I think they went up market. Up market is willing to pay a lot more. I know one guy doing an 8k camera with programmable features I hope won't be up market. If you can't get numbers, you can't reduce price enough.

The AI vision is feeding a lot of stuff (look at NVIDIA arm platform sales, to developers). So I think a number of companies, but rubber will meet road and after market satuates more, they will have to go bidding for contracts more, and have to have the ability to do so. In the lower end, they can just compete and keep selling. So, in the long term they might have to choose.

You can buy cameras below $30US and upwards OEM rebadged with brand. Distributors can buy a shipping container etc of them. They could simply offer one in each category this way to build up presence of distribution lines, to put higher end product out. Most cameras sold are rubbish or overly expensive. So there is room for a new Sanyo, Kodak Aiptek, Yi, Samsung that offers more for the price, including pro video standards and data rates, at least external SSD recording. People on the know will know what to buy, and what to recommend to their family and freinds to buy. It maybe a shrinking market, but that doesn't stop somebody from getting more of that.