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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

#191

Post by hyperman1 »

SahAssar wrote: post #187
greggsy wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Do you think you have a reasonable expectation of privacy when it comes to things that are both outdoors and literally viewable from space?

Anywhere is literally viewable from space. Some radiation types also give information to sats about what happens indoors. So your question is basically:

  Do you think you have a reasonable expectation of privacy anywhere ?
Reading it like this, is this really the world you want to promote? Or is privacy being only obtainable in bunkers a few km below the surface an acceptable compromise?

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

#192

Post by alibarber »

ackbar03 wrote: post #173
campchase wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

A good place to start might be the public space agencies, for example: https://scihub.copernicus.eu/

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

#193

Post by nicbou »

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…

Even laymen might end up creating wonderful little niche products if given access to things.

OpenStreetMap needs good imagery for mapping trails and buildings.

Off-roaders and overlanders need good imagery to verify the existence and state of trails.

That's just me, so I'm sure that there are tons of similar low key use cases.

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

#194

Post by dbetteridge »

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…

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

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

#195

Post by nicbou »

campchase wrote: post #145
altdataseller wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Yeah, this ultimately probably winds up being owned by one or more cloud providers. It’s also the most common business model I see startups trying to do. It usually doesn’t work because you can’t put lipstick (flat pricing, self-service sales motion, open licensing) on a pig (janky and secretly manual integrations with misaligned data providers who view your success as a threat to their most lucrative contracts). Mor…

I really enjoy reading your content. I have no use for any information, but the insight is still fascinating.

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

#196

Post by exikyut »

barrkel wrote: post #179
sandworm101 wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> 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.

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.

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

#198

Post by jjeaff »

hyperman1 wrote: post #191
SahAssar wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you think you have a reasonable expectation of privacy when it comes to things that are both outdoors and literally viewable from space?

Anywhere is literally viewable from space. Some radiation types also give information to sats about what happens indoors. So your question is basically: Do you think you have a reasonable expectation of privacy anywhere ? Reading it like this, is this really the world you want to promote? Or is privacy being only obtainable in bunkers a few km below the surface an acceptable compromise?

I'm not aware of any technology as of yet that can see activity through a thick and insulated roof from low earth orbit or even a few thousand feet up for that matter. But I could be wrong.

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

#200

Post by hyperman1 »

jjeaff wrote: post #198
hyperman1 wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anywhere is literally viewable from space. Some radiation types also give information to sats about what happens indoors. So your question is basically: Do you think you have a reasonable expectation of privacy anywhere ? Reading it like this, is this really the world you want to promote? Or is privacy being only obtainable in bunkers a few km below the surface an acceptable compromise?

I'm not aware of any technology as of yet that can see activity through a thick and insulated roof from low earth orbit or even a few thousand feet up for that matter. But I could be wrong.

I remember seeing a (dead tree) newspaper article a few years ago about the police using sat images to detect potential cannabis plantages by the heat radiating from the building.

Sorry, can't seem to find it on the net after a quick DDG

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