Is there a mass market for Earth Observation imagery?

Last week (15th &16th May 2018), inspirational speakers from the public and private sectors met at the Space Forum 2018 event in Luxembourg to discuss the impact of space technologies on the Earth’s businesses.

I was invited to take part of the “Earth Observation - a new universe of data & opportunities” session and took the opportunity to ask the question:

Is there a mass market for Earth Observation imagery?

I think first of all, it is important to look at the definition of mass market. According to the Cambridge Dictionary:

A product that is designed for the mass market is intended to be bought by as many people as possible, not just by people with a lot of money or a special interest.

When we consider this definition in the context of Earth observation imagery, the only mass market applications that comes to my mind is Google Maps.

Although Google Maps was quite a revolution at the time it was released to the public in 2006, more than ten years later, it is still in the top 5 of the most used mobile applications according to comScore.

For me, this triggers the following question:

Would you make important decisions for your personal or professional lives based on obsolete and inaccurate information?

Certainly not formulated that way; however, 9 out of 10 businesses use Google Maps to make important decisions despite its satellite imagery being out-of-date and poor quality in many places.

Average satellite background freshness in Google Maps vs. distribution of the world population.

Google Maps business model is driven by advertisement, so their efforts are focused toward 10% of the landmass where 95% of the population live. In these urban areas, Google Maps satellite basemap is updated around every 2 years and every 6 months if you are living in one of the top 100 megalopolis.

For most individuals and businesses, this appears very useful, because it is free and easy to use. But when you consider the capabilities of the current satellite imaging, it suddenly becomes unsatisfactory.

Indeed, when you know that the top three largest commercial imaging satellite constellations - Airbus Defence and Space with Pléiades and Spot satellites, DigitalGlobe with GeoEye and WorldView and Planet with SkySat satellites - have the joint capacity to acquire 8,500,000 sqkm of new images every single day.

The top three Earth observation satellite operators have the joint capacity to map the world’s landmass every two weeks at a sub-metre resolution.

So why I still can’t see my house on Google Maps?

Commercial satellite imagery is a very valuable source of information, but unfortunately only a handful of customers have been able to get their hands on it. High contractual, technical and commercial barriers mean that commercial imagery is only a privilege for select governmental and commercial organisations with the right level of resources.

• Contractual barriers: Navigating through the legal hurdles of a data procurement contract can be daunting and challenging process, between the technicality of the definitions to the uncertainty of end-user license agreement compliance, so the support of specialist law firms is more than just a “nice to have”.
• Commercial barriers: The traditional distribution model serves only large satellite image order which can range between few hundreds to tens of thousand USD for one single image depending on its age and resolution.
• Technical barriers: Even if you had the right resources (lawyers and budget) to get an image, its exploitation requires often specific software or hardware with expertise skills to manipulate them.

If we want to see a mass uptake of these images and realise its full market potential, it is critical that these barriers are lowered first:

• Contractual barriers: Simplified terms of uses need to be adopted, where users can read them online and accept to be bound to them by ticking the appropriate box before consuming the imagery straight away.
• Commercial barriers: The paradigm needs to change where end-users no longer need to purchase a large, expensive image but have the ability to consume a stream of small sections they are interested in and pay accordingly.
• Technical barriers: With the rapid increase in the number of online mapping applications and location based services, Earth observation imagery should be made available through simple APIs to be consumed and be made available to end-users at the click of a mouse.

At Bird.i, we’ve understood how important it is to lower these barriers, so we’ve made it our mission:

“We’ll make the best of the world’s satellite, airborne and drone images — and the insight they bring — accessible to everyone”

So, when we are asked: “Is there a mass market for Earth observation imagery?”, our answer is:

Not yet, but we’re working hard on it!

If you want to see how we’ve made available commercial satellite imagery accessible through a simple and easy-to-use Image Service, you can register your interest here and access afree trial.