I have been building drones for a few years now as a hobby. From a consumer standpoint, the pricing has come down substantially. You can build a fully autonomo

I have been building drones for a few years now as a hobby. From a consumer standpoint, the pricing has come down substantially. You can build a fully autonomous quadcopter for ~$500 these days (minus the transmitter). The problems I see are regulation, and battery performance. Regulations are really up in the air right now. There have been two rulings by judges that the FAA's current policies do not cover restriction of commercial usage for drones. The FAA is actively fighting this. I feel that over the next few years, we'll see some solid rules set down, and more than likely they'll be extremely strict to start. Statistically speaking, the FAA has an amazing track record, and letting anyone into the skies has a real chance of marring that record substantially. Cell power density is getting better and better, but it still takes a lot of work to get over an hour flight time on a multirotor. Thus they tend to be used for on-spot and precision flying shots for video. Fixed wing drones on the other hand have amazing range (I've seen 70km+ flights), but are less capable in the precision flying that a multirotor provides. On this topic, I am a huge fan of what Chris Anderson is doing over at 3DRobotics. Their open-source APM is the flight controller I choose for most of my projects, and it is extremely configurable. Hope this helps :)