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The satellite imagery industry still has no idea what customers want

joemorrison.substack.com

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Re: The satellite imagery industry still has no idea what customers want

#121

Post by astrange »

n8cpdx wrote: post #110
moralestapia wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem I have experienced first-hand is basically that >individual farms might want to look at relative growth rates of corn in their fields, or soil moisture levels, etc. a LOT of people want this, but they would never pay $x,xxx/month for that, ever.

The imagery is often already captured, so if I want to give Maxar $250 I don’t see why they wouldn’t take it. Eos (iirc it’s been a while) actually let me buy some imagery, but they would only give me pictures, not actual georeferenced rasters. The actual manipulation and use of the data, even for machine learning, is pretty straightforward these days with ArcGIS. So yes, I want pixels.

Usually corporate culture reasons prevent a business like that from just taking your money. They don't want to undercut their giant custom contracts and don't know how to handle customer support for cheaper people.

And I can imagine the cheaper customers are a lot less educated and don't have the right expectations, like how often their target area is covered in clouds.

Re: The satellite imagery industry still has no idea what customers want

#122

Post by sanguy »

avip wrote: post #92
GlenTheMachine wrote: post #46

Me: 20 years in the defense space business. Stating my own opinion. This is basically right. The problem with space imagery is that almost everyone who wants it has a niche use case, and those few organizations without a niche use case (the US Weather Service, various militaries, etc) generally want imagery that's so specialized to their own problem that they have to spec, buy, and operate their own orbital assets. T…

One company trying to address that is Up42, a subsidiary (hope that's the appropriate term) of Airbus, building some marketplace for SAT imaging analysis. Interested to hear Mr. glen's opinion about that approach.

Up42 only exist due to discounting pricing below commercial rates with some loss-leader pre-purchase discounting model.

History has shown that when you sell something for less then you pay for it; hoping that users don’t fully use their credits to cover that loss; that time is not on your side.

They are already the walking dead.

Re: The satellite imagery industry still has no idea what customers want

#123

Post by riversflow »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #100
enriquto wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The problem with space imagery is that almost everyone who wants it has a niche use case But this is a good problem. It's like saying "the problem with motors is that everyone who uses them has a niche use case" (submarines, cars, airplanes, industrial machinery...). Or that "the problem with microscopy is that everyone who wants it has a niche use case". And indeed it does! Microscopes for biologists are different…

> like saying "the problem with motors is that everyone who uses them has a niche use case" (submarines, cars, airplanes, industrial machinery...) This is a good analogy. How many companies say “I’ll build a sweet motor and then find a customer for it”? They don’t. They build the motor for the application. (More often, they build something close to the final product.)

> They don’t.

Wrong. They absolutely do. In fact I’d wager the vast majority of motors are essentially commodity goods. Even if you were thinking of just combustion engines, its really not the case, most engines get reused many times. Which makes sense, its an outsized engineering problem to optimize so you’d want to maximize your return.

For example. https://www.mcmaster.com/electric-motors/

Re: The satellite imagery industry still has no idea what customers want

#124

Post by kanbara »

mturmon wrote: post #74

I found the argument(s) interesting although the animations hurt readability and clarity. I've watched the area of commercialized remote sensing products with some interest, because I'm in the non-commercial remote sensing line. The way NASA handles derived data products is (broadly) through "levels": L0: measurement, still in instrument native units (e.g., DN's) L1: calibrated and put into physical units (e.g., watt…

the NASA levels are the same way that RapidEye and later SkySat were handled at RapidEye/BlackBridge/Planet.

Re: The satellite imagery industry still has no idea what customers want

#125

Post by altdataseller »

lokimedes wrote: post #90

As someone from the industry, all I really want, is a Netflix of datasets. Planet.com, Capella, Maxar, ICEYE, AIRBUS etc.. I hate the guts of their B2B business models. I want an aggregator, I want basemaps that are refreshed on a best-effort basis (not by me buying km^2 of observations), I want standardized formats and metadata across vendors. Give me that, with some obscene, but transparent pricing structure, that…

Isn’t that the Snowflake Data Marketplace, AWS Marketplace and to a lesser extent Quandl?

Re: The satellite imagery industry still has no idea what customers want

#126

Post by tomc1985 »

GlenTheMachine wrote: post #46

Me: 20 years in the defense space business. Stating my own opinion. This is basically right. The problem with space imagery is that almost everyone who wants it has a niche use case, and those few organizations without a niche use case (the US Weather Service, various militaries, etc) generally want imagery that's so specialized to their own problem that they have to spec, buy, and operate their own orbital assets. T…

> That use case is not one any commercial provider anywhere is going to build an ML model for.

Why not? It's been a while since the west has had a war where the moral details are so clear. If I had a company like this I'd be jumping on the opportunity.

Re: The satellite imagery industry still has no idea what customers want

#127

Post by tomc1985 »

GlenTheMachine wrote: post #76
soniman wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't think the US military is providing for all of Ukraine's satellite intelligence needs?

I think it’s very, very unlikely. It would risk giving away information on the capabilities of US national security assets. Which is classified literally as highly as it is possible to classify. We don’t even let the Five Eyes know that stuff, much less hand it to non-aligned militaries who we can’t vet. Plus, it doesn’t appear to be needed. The Russian military is proving to be god-awful at even basic field ops like…

> It would risk giving away information on the capabilities of US national security assets.

Trump already did this when that Iranian something-or-another blew up (missile silo? nuclear reactor?) a few years ago, and he provided classified satellite images to the pubic

Beyond that, sure

Re: The satellite imagery industry still has no idea what customers want

#128

Post by derekbaker783 »

sandworm101 wrote: post #107
campchase wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the perspective, Glen. I've often heard this referred to as the "long tail" problem for satellite imagery providers. The area under the curve is enormous, but any one algorithm only serves an extremely niche audience. Another analogy I use a lot: satellite imagery is like salt. The dish can have lots of ingredients (in a military context: HUMINT, OSINT, SIGINT, etc.) And the satellite imagery can make the…

>> 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…

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

Re: The satellite imagery industry still has no idea what customers want

#130

Post by csteubs »

Underpinning much of this is the costs associated with image capture and the lack of fine-grain temporal resolution. You can write software to analyze and pinpoint certain "things" the customer is looking for, but in all cases that analysis is a snapshot of a moment in time. Stringing along multiple snapshots helps paint a broader picture, but revisit rate is still a few times a day in the BEST case (and the customer likely has deep pockets if that's true). The bottleneck is image capture.

The satellite industry is an incredibly high-walled garden. Launch costs are falling and the use of off-the-shelf hardware combined with smaller satellite forms is improving revisit, but it's a steep hill to climb no less. Custom-built monitoring algos are subject to diminishing returns based on a variety of factors and the number of images in a data set is certainly part of that.

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