Google Imagery: Cost-effective, accurate imagery for your operations

Satellite imagery doesn't get much better than 0.5m because of physics and govmint[1].

Sxfh refers to skybox. They are very exciting, offering satellite video feeds. It's important to note that they don't offer global live coverage - as the satellite flys over the globe, you get a 'strip' of video. So at a given location, you get a very short period of video, and then the satellite has moved on and nothing until another one flies over.

To me, drones or balloons would be the only candidates for providing ubiquitous video coverage of a city for instance (see NPR documentary last year), but even then, cloud is an issue.

I tend to wonder if the best way of observing a city would be to fuse radar from multiple satellites to build a live, cloud immune 3D model of the city surface.

[1]GeoEye hope to achieve 0.34m with GeoEye-2, but will probably only be allowed to release it at 0.5m.

From Wikipedia: A unique exclusive process of imagery capturing, processing and publishing is used. Traditionally, high resolution aerial imagery has to be captured by a low altitude flying aircraft, then the data is manually processed and stitched together digitally to create a PhotoMap, a slow process which can take months to complete. nearmap speeds up this process by using their own engineered camera capture equipment, named a 'HyperPod', which is attached to Cessna 210 light aircraft, which fly at a high altitude, enabling entire cities to be captured in a day or two. Once the imagery is captured, it is processed through super computers which run software known as 'HyperVision' which automatically processes and stitches together the many individual photographs captured into one virtually seamless PhotoMap. These PhotoMaps are then hosted on nearmap's end user web portal, known as 'MapBrowser'. Along with traditional top-down photography, the HyperPod is also able to capture oblique aerial photographs from 4 different angles and digital elevation model data at the same time.

http://viewer.nationalmap.gov/viewer/

The resolution is not the quality Google is offering but it worked for what I was doing. And the price (free) was right.

When I see a "Contact Us" button where the price should be, I'm generally suspicious the price is more than I want to pay for a small or a hobby project.