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Comment by campchase | Hacker News Reader

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 whole dish. But you never want to consume it in isolation, that would be disgusting.

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>> 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 vague statements about times. That doesn't work. Normal customers, ie not intelligence agencies, don't want a drawn-out negotiation process. The first company that can provide a basic web interface for purchasing imagery quickly and piecemeal will win the market.

Top of the list for small customers are probably high-end real estate agents. They want to monitor their neighborhoods for houses that are under delayed construction or backyards/pools that are being neglected (sure signs of someone ready to sell).

Civil litigation attorneys: I want everything you have about this particular intersection. Cops: I want any images you have of this house between these dates. News agencies: There is a Russian ship on fire at X location. When can you get us an image? And a great many other small customers I cannot think of at the moment.

I agree. The first time I wrote about this same frustration a couple years changed my whole life—it’s how I wound up at my current job and something I still believe in very deeply: https://joemorrison.medium.com/the-commercial-satellite-imag...

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

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/

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 delivery man is at in real time through satellite imaging but that can't possibly be a profitable use case.

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.

I want to give a location (pix+radius, four corners or whatever) and a delivery schedule (once a week etc)

This is the requirement. The timeline could be once a week, once a month or once a .. - the point is not frequency but predictability. With Google Earth, Open Source, et al there is no predictability, that's why they are not answer for THIS potential customer.

(US) Municipal governments that deal with Real Property have similar interests: they use the imagery to help maintain assessment data.

I would imagine major US/European cities are pretty well-served in this regard by annual and semi-annual aerial surveys. But that still leaves a lot of smaller cities who aren’t pro-actively covered by Nearmap/Hexagon/etc. They are part of the long, long tail that is criminally underserved today.

> 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.

Obviously if you don’t want your pool surveilled by low orbit satellites, you’re free to either raise your home to a higher altitude, or consider relocating to a more private and subterranean dwelling.

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

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

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

Yes, that would make sense because lots of grow lights can cause significant heat. I don't think heat technology could see individual people through a roof though.

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

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.

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

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?

That’s a good point: often the data product isn’t generated solely (or even mainly) from orbital imagery. Often it’s provided mainly from data the end user already has, and for which orbital imagery serves either as a cueing system (providing candidate locations which the end user will verify) or a verification system (providing final verification of locations the end user has already cued).

Certainly that’s true with eg the petroleum industry, and big ag.

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