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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

#211

Post by pas »

ackbar03 wrote: post #206
ricardobeat wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Well, this seems to cry for a big coalition. build it and they'll come. Iridium failed because it was too early (too costly, only a few specialized users had the cash for it), Starlink seems to thrive because they can go general.

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

#212

Post by kritiko »

hyperman1 wrote: post #200
jjeaff wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I think they were using plain old thermal imaging cameras (not satellites). However, Kyllo v United States now requires a warrant for that.

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

#215

Post by AlexDoll »

working in the agribusiness industry. I can tell you that satellite imagery solves many problems. But just satellite images won't help. You need to analyze and calculate various indices and indicators. I can say that the accuracy of analysis is high and it is definitely worth spending money on this software. Here I found some interesting information about high resolution imagery

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

#216

Post by AlexDoll »

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…

working in the agribusiness industry. I can tell you that satellite imagery solves many problems. But just satellite images won't help. You need to analyze and calculate various indices and indicators. I can say that the accuracy of analysis is high and it is definitely worth spending money on this software. Here I found some interesting information about high resolution imagery https://eos.com/products/high-resolution-images/

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

#217

Post by ogennadi »

PeterisP wrote: post #165
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.

There are like 2 million farms in USA, and if that information is worth to them something like $10/month then that's a potential market worth quarter of a billion per year..

Tractor companies (e.g. John Deere, CASE) provide this information in their cloud offerings

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

#218

Post by noplsbecivil »

campchase wrote: post #154
noplsbecivil wrote: post #115

Me: 2 years at a satellite imagery company a few years back This is mostly true, though I will add there are some repeatable insights that people will pay for. In the financial sector, there were plenty of people who paid for car counts data back in 2016 (though many customers did not renew) and there are still people today who are interested in oil inventories data, and mall traffic data (though satellite data is be…

Thank you for sharing that, I find it very validating. Sometimes it’s nerve racking to publish an opinion piece like this when I know I am extrapolating from very limited and biased information. Sounds like you worked at Orbital Insight, Descartes Labs, or SpaceKnow (in order of likelihood)?

Yes i did work at one of the above. The car count data was actually more interesting than people even realized. One thing even many quant funds missed was that the quality of our 'raw counts' still depended on cloud cover which was meta data that was for whatever reason something we didn't share (no one asked for it), so the quality of the signal depended on the geography. Ie sunny places had more signal - there was even a short window back in 2016 before credit card data was more heavily used, that you could predict the earnings results of retail chains in socal pretty well with our data.

To your article's point, I believe my company ended up trying to switch to a platform that allowed people to create their own insights, but im not sure how successful that was in the end

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

#219

Post by t0mas88 »

hyperman1 wrote: post #200
jjeaff wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Thermal imaging is easy from a helicopter or survey aircraft, that's enough to find likely locations for plantages.

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

#220

Post by kpennell »

Demiurge wrote: post #175

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.

It's so much cheaper to take photos on land vs. in space. Seems like that price difference and what people do with satellite photos vs. handheld camera photos makes them pretty different.
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