The satellite imagery industry still has no idea what customers want

(1) is a desktop (and now mobile) application that trader, sales, etc. use to communicate, view raw data, and view derived data in "mini-apps" (price this bond under scenario X, etc.) The base cost is about 25K USD per year (there are local IT costs above the terminal license fees). There is a raw data access API for Excel, but very limited. They block your API access if you try to download too much data. The days of pricing any kind of volume of products from a Excel Bloomberg API is mostly gone. Also, you cannot run it on a server and just screen scrape / use data API all day long.

(2) is a raw data feed service, akin to Reuters. Not well understood by industry outsiders: There is no "all you can eat data service" anywhere in finance. Period. Every primary data source is now carefully guarded with license costs and special rules (no redist, etc.). Some stock exchanges make more money selling data licenses than collection trading fees! I have no idea about BPIPE prices, but I assume expensive and per data source with nearly infinite granularity.

About revenue: (1) Wiki says: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloomberg_Terminal

If you believe it: 20K USD per terminal and ~325,000 terminals as of 2016. That is 6.5 billion USD per year. Nice.

About revenue: (2) No idea. I cannot find any reliable published stats.

Lastly: I regularly see people argue on HN about an open source version of Bloomberg. It is impossible for two reasons: (a) Network effect in the communication channels -- lots of people mostly use Bloomberg chat / email and hardly use data, besides the trivial. Most people on the buy side (money management, hedge funds, portfolio managers) join Bloomberg to talk to other people on Bloomberg. And: (b) data licensing.

What we are trying to do is indeed allow customers to build algorithms tailored to their use cases. We often joke that the reason our ML works is because we are overfitting to customer datasets/use cases. But I think that's somewhat true in the sense that we are not going for "worldwide trees counting" but more for "reliably count cars on these 50 parcels".

It's also interesting to note that a sizeable chunk of our revenue is coming from companies with drone data where it makes even more sense to be specific to customer data (resolution, time of day, geo, etc...).

If they really want new customers they should make this more accessible to laypeople.

But that got old and started researching satellite options. Problems was our company entire sales area was three West Michigan counties. All the companies wanted to sell me, I forget the term but say a tract (scene?), that was half the state.

I didn't have a problem with the price per acre but wanted to buy by the section or 640 acres. It didn't make a lot of sense to buy the township but they wouldn't even sell me by the county. At the time probably 5% of my customers wanted this service and only wanted to buy just part of their acreage.

I asked all these vendors why they couldn't sell me by the township. They routinely answered they'd lose money because they couldn't sell the rest of the tract. I said now you understand my problem, at a certain point you've got to break up a tract or give up on the market. Most of the company's ended up leaving ag.

I eventually found a company that would sell by the section at a higher but still manageable price. Course then I discovered that in four flyovers a season the majority had clouds over the field and you couldn't see anything ;FYI The military has satellites using radar to see through the clouds, but in thirty years that tech hasn't made it to the commercial operators.

The answer I think is automated drones that fly a circuit. The tech has been available for a few years but the government won't approve it for that use. In fact the FAA won't even let a Detroit company demonstrate they could successfully evade objects, they ran out of funding and shut their doors ;<(.