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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

#171

Post by ackbar03 »

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…

How plausible is this actually?

The surface of the earth is huge and given the high-resolution close-to-realtime imagery that most people want, its not really possible to provide standardized sets of images that just happen to cover the region-of-interest for everyone right? Hence the need to targeted imaging.

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

#172

Post by ackbar03 »

frakkingcylons wrote: post #48
campchase wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is, indeed, exactly what I am arguing. Either: * Just sell data or; * Just sell applications powered by your proprietary source of data Do not: * Sell derived/refined data as a half-measure * Sell both applications and wholesale data at the same time If you feel like that doesn't make sense, you are not alone. Almost everyone in the industry disagrees with my views on this topic based on how they run their busin…

> Sell both applications and wholesale data at the same time Bloomberg comes to mind since they offer wholesale access to data in addition to all the terminal functions.

Bloomberg's main product offering is still the data feed though. The "application" part of it definitely makes it easier to use but a lot of trading desks build their own algorithms and pricers on top of that data for the functionality they really need. The built in stuff bloomberg has tends to be overly simplified

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

#173

Post by ackbar03 »

campchase wrote: post #27
faldore wrote: post #6

This seems like the kind of insight that is better monetized than preached - the value will not be perceived until there is a business success that derived from it.

I sell satellite imagery. I want more people to start application companies, and less people to start data feed companies. "Preaching" is the most scalable way to try to convince people to change tack. I can't personally start dozens of application companies, but I can hopefully help spur the founding of those firms through my writing.

> I want more people to start application companies

Are you aware of ways for a hypothetical start-up team to get cheap/affordable raw imagery data to attempt this? Instead of paying B2B prices upfront just for experimentation?

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

#174

Post by nl »

achow wrote: post #167
ackbar03 wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 deli…

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.

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.

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

#175

Post by Demiurge »

It’s a little bit like saying “the photography industry still has no idea what customers want”. That’s the kind of thing open markets figure out. There are data providers of all kinds of data, and the data consumers need to find this data somehow.

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

#176

Post by jandrewrogers »

campchase wrote: post #149
jandrewrogers wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having worked in the sensing analysis market for a long time, I would frame the recurring business problem as follows, and it applies to sensing data generally, not just satellite imagery: There is a large market gap between the sensor platform providers and the would-be end users of that sensor data. Business is constrained by the fact that the end users are not capable of consuming what is being produced and neithe…

I think this is a fair summary. Don’t sleep on GEE, Orbital Insight, and Descartes Labs, though. All three have incredibly impressive platforms that can spin up new custom models and deploy them at scale very quickly. And Microsoft is starting to make a major push into the space with their Planetary Computer initiative. Early innings yet, though, I agree about that.

A challenge is that there is often an increasing use case to blend remote sensing data models with active telemetry data models, since they are complementary for many (most?) analytics of this type. The remote sensing platforms have no capacity to deal with telemetry data models, and the telemetry platforms have no capacity to deal with remote sensing.

The workloads and computer science are very different, but bringing them together would add a lot of value. At least with current platforms on the market, one is always to the exclusion of the other.

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

#177

Post by baxtr »

mikestew wrote: post #13
Eric_WVGG wrote: post #7

> Allow me to put it more succinctly: selling derived data as a subscription product does. not. work. I don’t care what it is. The juice is never worth the squeeze.¹ Count cars. Count airplanes. Count ships. Segment land cover. Track oil inventories. Estimate biofuels. Measure water levels. Etc. Etc. Etc. I see that he outlined a few exceptions at the footnote… I'll also add Plaid. I think this guy is making some hug…

Fed Ex (quite surprising) have decided that freely providing delivery dates to consumers is too value to leave to third parties... ...or to leave to the shipping endpoint customer, either. I can't tell you how many clicks it takes to determine when a particular shipment will arrive at my door. Off the top of my head: 0. Email from vendor: "your package has shipped!" 1. Log in to the Fedex account. 2. One would think…

I’m not sure if it works in the FedEx case, but one thing I have noticed: most sites forget where you wanted to go before logging in.

So here is what I do:

- open the mail link

- log in

- go back to the mail program and open the link again to bring me to the page I wanted to see in the first place

Would that work in your case?

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

#178

Post by Closi »

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…

The underlying reason for all of this is price discrimination - they are worried that simple and transparent pricing will lose them margin because their highest value/margin customers will have comparative pricing to help them negotiate.

On the flipside, if you put forward transparent pricing but it’s too high, it will stop prospective customers coming.

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

#179

Post by barrkel »

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…

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.

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

#180

Post by greggsy »

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…

> 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.

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