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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
Do you think you have a reasonable expectation of privacy anywhere ?
Sorry, can't seem to find it on the net after a quick DDG
Market segmentation by ability to pay can mean cheaper imagery for a chunk of the market than a flat fee.
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.
Or are we thinking of a satellite that can actually be targeted at things on demand - selling time or fuel?
Certainly that’s true with eg the petroleum industry, and big ag.
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.