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>> but any one algorithm only serves an extremely niche audience. Forget the algorithm. They need to fix their customer service, their sales process. Custome

>> but any one algorithm only serves an extremely niche audience. Forget the algorithm. They need to fix their customer service, their sales process. Customers want pixels, but they need basic services: simple and a predictable price. I want to give a location (pix+radius, four corners or whatever) and a delivery schedule (once a week etc). But when I try to buy that stuff I get package deals, "ask for a quote", and vague statements about times. That doesn't work. Normal customers, ie not intelligence agencies, don't want a drawn-out negotiation process. The first company that can provide a basic web interface for purchasing imagery quickly and piecemeal will win the market. Top of the list for small customers are probably high-end real estate agents. They want to monitor their neighborhoods for houses that are under delayed construction or backyards/pools that are being neglected (sure signs of someone ready to sell). Civil litigation attorneys: I want everything you have about this particular intersection. Cops: I want any images you have of this house between these dates. News agencies: There is a Russian ship on fire at X location. When can you get us an image? And a great many other small customers I cannot think of at the moment.

derekbaker783 5y ago
(US) Municipal governments that deal with Real Property have similar interests: they use the imagery to help maintain assessment data.
- campchase 5y ago
  I would imagine major US/European cities are pretty well-served in this regard by annual and semi-annual aerial surveys. But that still leaves a lot of smaller cities who aren’t pro-actively covered by Nearmap/Hexagon/etc. They are part of the long, long tail that is criminally underserved today.
campchase 5y ago
I agree. The first time I wrote about this same frustration a couple years changed my whole life—it’s how I wound up at my current job and something I still believe in very deeply: https://joemorrison.medium.com/the-commercial-satellite-imagery-business-model-is-broken-6f0e437ec29d https://joemorrison.medium.com/the-commercial-satellite-imag...
ackbar03 5y ago
Regarding small customers such as the real estate agents, attorneys, and cops etc. is it actually economically profitable to serve people like them? I know satellites are getting cheaper but there are still limits to the cost of targeted image acquisition right? Is the price at which these customers are able and willing to pay enough to cover those costs? For example it'd be a cool feature to check where my food delivery man is at in real time through satellite imaging but that can't possibly be a profitable use case.
- achow 5y ago
  Parent commentator's contention.. Pixels are there anyway, and infinitely scalable - you can sell exact same pixels to infinite number of people. So why not to make a very easy UX to extract the pixels of your choice as per customized timeline. It almost sounds foolish not to do it.
  - nl 5y ago
    The issue is that Google Earth imagery is good enough for most manual processes, Open Source imagery is good enough for a lot of automatic processes and there are relatively few markets that are willing to pay for frequent (1 month+) updates.
    - achow 5y ago
      I want to give a location (pix+radius, four corners or whatever) and a delivery schedule (once a week etc) This is the requirement. The timeline could be once a week, once a month or once a .. - the point is not frequency but predictability. With Google Earth, Open Source, et al there is no predictability, that's why they are not answer for THIS potential customer.
barrkel 5y ago
How do they charge more profitable customers more in that case? Market segmentation by ability to pay can mean cheaper imagery for a chunk of the market than a flat fee.
- exikyut 5y ago
  SLAs, perhaps - and more broadly, the notion that even reasonable SLAs means $$$$$$, while non-SLA means $$$$ but basically best-effort and costs significantly less. So for example non-SLA "once a week" might really mean "once a week except if any of these 4 million other things take precedence" and translate to intervals being skipped on a regular basis, photos being days or weeks old, etc. SLA'd once-a-week would really be once a week and not a second late, but truly prohibitively expensive. I'm reminded of the early US telephone systems in the 60s and 70s around WWII etc where Important People could pick up a phone and always get a connection even if that booted off a few tens or hundreds of calls on a shared trunk in the call path. Satellite is like an order-of magnitude-worse version of that problem because of the associated eye-watering costs and subsequent plain old near-zero availability.
  - michaelt 5y ago
    Depends - is the business model operating satellites on a fixed orbit (a full scan of the planet every week, say) and selling the images? Or are we thinking of a satellite that can actually be targeted at things on demand - selling time or fuel?
  - gampleman 5y ago
    SLAs are difficult with satellites since you generally can't guarantee you'll be able to produce imagery due to weather.
greggsy 5y ago
> Top of the list for small customers are probably high-end real estate agents… [want to monitor] backyards/pools that are being neglected. This is basically corporate surveillance and I’m not at all comfortable with it. If you changed ‘real estate agent’ to ‘large landlord company’, the public would find this exceptionally unpalatable.
- throwaway284534 5y ago
  Obviously if you don’t want your pool surveilled by low orbit satellites, you’re free to either raise your home to a higher altitude, or consider relocating to a more private and subterranean dwelling.
- SahAssar 5y ago
  Do you think you have a reasonable expectation of privacy when it comes to things that are both outdoors and literally viewable from space?
  - ilammy 5y ago
    When you go outdoors, people are free to look at you, but that does not mean (as a rule) they can shoot pictures of you without your permission. Same principle can be applied to your property. Like, if a stalker takes a photo of your window hourly or keeps track of your car – that could be treated as infringement of privacy. If a door is unlocked, that does not mean you're allowed to trespass.
    - Stratoscope 5y ago
      > When you go outdoors, people are free to look at you, but that does not mean (as a rule) they can shoot pictures of you without your permission. That's not generally true in the United States. If you are on public property, you can take a photo of anything or anyone you can see. You do not need their permission. There may be local laws that restrict this, but they are not the common case. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photography_and_the_law#United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photography_and_the_law#United... More detail: http://www.krages.com/ThePhotographersRight.pdf http://www.krages.com/ThePhotographersRight.pdf
dbetteridge 5y ago
https://www.eagleview.com/ https://www.eagleview.com/ These guys seem to be doing what you're interested in from the ordering side at least (Perth, Australia startup now gone to North America too). But they use plane based images, so anything in a warzone is out
AlexDoll 5y ago
working in the agribusiness industry. I can tell you that satellite imagery solves many problems. But just satellite images won't help. You need to analyze and calculate various indices and indicators. I can say that the accuracy of analysis is high and it is definitely worth spending money on this software. Here I found some interesting information about high resolution imagery https://eos.com/products/high-resolution-images/ https://eos.com/products/high-resolution-images/

derekbaker783 5y ago

(US) Municipal governments that deal with Real Property have similar interests: they use the imagery to help maintain assessment data.

campchase 5y ago
I would imagine major US/European cities are pretty well-served in this regard by annual and semi-annual aerial surveys. But that still leaves a lot of smaller cities who aren’t pro-actively covered by Nearmap/Hexagon/etc. They are part of the long, long tail that is criminally underserved today.

campchase 5y ago

I agree. The first time I wrote about this same frustration a couple years changed my whole life—it’s how I wound up at my current job and something I still believe in very deeply: https://joemorrison.medium.com/the-commercial-satellite-imagery-business-model-is-broken-6f0e437ec29d https://joemorrison.medium.com/the-commercial-satellite-imag...

ackbar03 5y ago

Regarding small customers such as the real estate agents, attorneys, and cops etc. is it actually economically profitable to serve people like them? I know satellites are getting cheaper but there are still limits to the cost of targeted image acquisition right? Is the price at which these customers are able and willing to pay enough to cover those costs? For example it'd be a cool feature to check where my food delivery man is at in real time through satellite imaging but that can't possibly be a profitable use case.

achow 5y ago
Parent commentator's contention.. Pixels are there anyway, and infinitely scalable - you can sell exact same pixels to infinite number of people. So why not to make a very easy UX to extract the pixels of your choice as per customized timeline. It almost sounds foolish not to do it.
- nl 5y ago
  The issue is that Google Earth imagery is good enough for most manual processes, Open Source imagery is good enough for a lot of automatic processes and there are relatively few markets that are willing to pay for frequent (1 month+) updates.
  - achow 5y ago
    I want to give a location (pix+radius, four corners or whatever) and a delivery schedule (once a week etc) This is the requirement. The timeline could be once a week, once a month or once a .. - the point is not frequency but predictability. With Google Earth, Open Source, et al there is no predictability, that's why they are not answer for THIS potential customer.

barrkel 5y ago

How do they charge more profitable customers more in that case? Market segmentation by ability to pay can mean cheaper imagery for a chunk of the market than a flat fee.

exikyut 5y ago
SLAs, perhaps - and more broadly, the notion that even reasonable SLAs means $$$$$$, while non-SLA means $$$$ but basically best-effort and costs significantly less. So for example non-SLA "once a week" might really mean "once a week except if any of these 4 million other things take precedence" and translate to intervals being skipped on a regular basis, photos being days or weeks old, etc. SLA'd once-a-week would really be once a week and not a second late, but truly prohibitively expensive. I'm reminded of the early US telephone systems in the 60s and 70s around WWII etc where Important People could pick up a phone and always get a connection even if that booted off a few tens or hundreds of calls on a shared trunk in the call path. Satellite is like an order-of magnitude-worse version of that problem because of the associated eye-watering costs and subsequent plain old near-zero availability.
- michaelt 5y ago
  Depends - is the business model operating satellites on a fixed orbit (a full scan of the planet every week, say) and selling the images? Or are we thinking of a satellite that can actually be targeted at things on demand - selling time or fuel?
- gampleman 5y ago
  SLAs are difficult with satellites since you generally can't guarantee you'll be able to produce imagery due to weather.

greggsy 5y ago

> Top of the list for small customers are probably high-end real estate agents… [want to monitor] backyards/pools that are being neglected. This is basically corporate surveillance and I’m not at all comfortable with it. If you changed ‘real estate agent’ to ‘large landlord company’, the public would find this exceptionally unpalatable.

throwaway284534 5y ago
Obviously if you don’t want your pool surveilled by low orbit satellites, you’re free to either raise your home to a higher altitude, or consider relocating to a more private and subterranean dwelling.
SahAssar 5y ago
Do you think you have a reasonable expectation of privacy when it comes to things that are both outdoors and literally viewable from space?
- ilammy 5y ago
  When you go outdoors, people are free to look at you, but that does not mean (as a rule) they can shoot pictures of you without your permission. Same principle can be applied to your property. Like, if a stalker takes a photo of your window hourly or keeps track of your car – that could be treated as infringement of privacy. If a door is unlocked, that does not mean you're allowed to trespass.
  - Stratoscope 5y ago
    > When you go outdoors, people are free to look at you, but that does not mean (as a rule) they can shoot pictures of you without your permission. That's not generally true in the United States. If you are on public property, you can take a photo of anything or anyone you can see. You do not need their permission. There may be local laws that restrict this, but they are not the common case. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photography_and_the_law#United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photography_and_the_law#United... More detail: http://www.krages.com/ThePhotographersRight.pdf http://www.krages.com/ThePhotographersRight.pdf

dbetteridge 5y ago

https://www.eagleview.com/ https://www.eagleview.com/ These guys seem to be doing what you're interested in from the ordering side at least (Perth, Australia startup now gone to North America too). But they use plane based images, so anything in a warzone is out

AlexDoll 5y ago

working in the agribusiness industry. I can tell you that satellite imagery solves many problems. But just satellite images won't help. You need to analyze and calculate various indices and indicators. I can say that the accuracy of analysis is high and it is definitely worth spending money on this software. Here I found some interesting information about high resolution imagery https://eos.com/products/high-resolution-images/ https://eos.com/products/high-resolution-images/