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Comment by lokimedes | Hacker News Reader

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 lets me explore for discretionary funds and exploit for less money than triggering tenders and investment decisions. Then, then you have what will move the entire commercial earth observation industry out of the CAPEX-fryer it’s in today. For anything less, there’s stiff competition from ESA’s free Sentinel satellites.

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The underlying reason for all of this is price discrimination - they are worried that simple and transparent pricing will lose them margin because their highest value/margin customers will have comparative pricing to help them negotiate.

On the flipside, if you put forward transparent pricing but it’s too high, it will stop prospective customers coming.

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.

How plausible is this actually?

The surface of the earth is huge and given the high-resolution close-to-realtime imagery that most people want, its not really possible to provide standardized sets of images that just happen to cover the region-of-interest for everyone right? Hence the need to targeted imaging.

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). More here: “Stop Building Satellite Imagery Platforms and Marketplaces” https://joemorrison.medium.com/stop-building-satellite-image...

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

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