Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The satellite imagery industry still has no idea what customers want

joemorrison.substack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

201–210 of 225 posts

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

#201

Post by fnands »

rmason wrote: post #189

When I was an agronomist I used satellite imagery a lot for monitoring farm crops for our customers. Started in the early eighties going up in a Cessna laying on my belly where the passenger seat was sticking a 35mm camera out a repair port. 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 fo…

Things have changed a bit at least, but it's still very provider dependant.

Planet at least will let you pay per pixel for their PlanetScope data (3m res) and with a daily revisit time you are guaranteed at least a few hits per month in the growing season.

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

#202

Post by ricardobeat »

ackbar03 wrote: post #164
sandworm101 wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> find the problem sets that have the best match up and focus on those. Or, abandon all of that. A space imagery company is a media company. They generate content. So do what other content creators do. Take everything you have and shovel it in front of people as fast as possible. Deliver it by any and every means available. Ask questions, but do so AFTER they have already made a purchase. Then judge what your custom…

Is this even feasible? I imagine high resolution satellite imagery is a lot larger than your typical blog post or youtube video. Plus the surface of the earth is huge, if you push out everything 95% of it is probably irrelevant crap that doesn't tell you anything about your customers. But I don't run a media or satellite imagery company so this is just what i imagine lol

Why would that matter? Consumers get to choose which subset of the data they use. If they want to download the entire Earth at 5PB, just charge them appropriately.

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

#203

Post by fnands »

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…

I think UP42 is trying this model. They have a catalogue where you can download archived data or task it. But yeah, right now their sources are a bit limited, and its' an open question whether or not they'll be able to sign up enough providers to make it work.

And they might be falling into the trap that the original article points out by trying to offer you processed data instead of being laser focused on having the best data sources and API.

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

#205

Post by michaelt »

exikyut wrote: post #196
barrkel wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 r…

Depends - is the business model operating satellites on a fixed orbit (a full scan of the planet every week, say) and selling the images?

Or are we thinking of a satellite that can actually be targeted at things on demand - selling time or fuel?

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

#206

Post by ackbar03 »

ricardobeat wrote: post #202
ackbar03 wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this even feasible? I imagine high resolution satellite imagery is a lot larger than your typical blog post or youtube video. Plus the surface of the earth is huge, if you push out everything 95% of it is probably irrelevant crap that doesn't tell you anything about your customers. But I don't run a media or satellite imagery company so this is just what i imagine lol

Why would that matter? Consumers get to choose which subset of the data they use. If they want to download the entire Earth at 5PB, just charge them appropriately.

My impression is that it matters because if the data hasn't been collected with a specific purpose in mind, then its probably not gonna be useful for a lot of cases.

Say I'm a farmer and for examples sake I want regular aerial images to estimate crop yield for a plot of land. That would require high resolution imaging of a particular patch everyday for maybe a few months. That would require purposeful data capturing at regular time intervals during overhead satellite passes.

From what i understand satellite imaging companies won't happen to just have those images containing the region of interest you want just lying around on their hard-drives which they can pull out with some query. If they make all the images they have available to the public, I'm guessing most of it will be useless to people considering it needs to cover the desired region of interest across time and space.

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

#207

Post by gampleman »

exikyut wrote: post #196
barrkel wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 r…

SLAs are difficult with satellites since you generally can't guarantee you'll be able to produce imagery due to weather.

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

#208

Post by Stratoscope »

ilammy wrote: post #190
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?

When you go outdoors, people are free to look at you, but that does not mean (as a rule) they can shoot pictures of you without your permission. Same principle can be applied to your property. Like, if a stalker takes a photo of your window hourly or keeps track of your car – that could be treated as infringement of privacy. If a door is unlocked, that does not mean you're allowed to trespass.

> When you go outdoors, people are free to look at you, but that does not mean (as a rule) they can shoot pictures of you without your permission.

That's not generally true in the United States. If you are on public property, you can take a photo of anything or anyone you can see. You do not need their permission.

There may be local laws that restrict this, but they are not the common case.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photography_and_the_law#United...

More detail:

http://www.krages.com/ThePhotographersRight.pdf

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

#209

Post by vonwoodson »

campchase wrote: post #151
vonwoodson wrote: post #129

Panopticon. I want worldwide 24/7 live video footage. I want with enough resolution to identify letters on a printed page on the ground. And, I don’t want it to cost the entire global GDP to make and operate. Get cracking.

Sorry to break it to you but you already have access to this. It’s called MODIS, and it’s free ;)

One frame per 24-48 hours is unacceptable. I said I want world-wide 24/7 120hz video, not “in the footprint sometimes by chance” 10km^2 at-a-time imagery.

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

#210

Post by tbran »

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…

For quick tracking lookups on DuckDuckGo you can do:

!usps

!fedex

!ups

Post reply on HN