IntroductionAt the Location Intelligence Conference in San Francisco I attended a short seminar which included speakers from the Unites States' 2 primary providers of satellite imagery,
GeoEye and
Digital Globe. Both of the speakers were asked about the future of satellite imagery in the coming year, and both had similar comments. (Both companies plan to launch new satellites in 2007,
GeoEye-1 and
Worldview.)
Apparently the satellite imagery providers have had an increase in demand for their products due to an increase in public awareness about such imagery spawned from
Google Earth and
Google Maps. This is part of what is known at the “Google Effect”. I must admit I use Google Maps on almost a daily basis, and it can be very useful if you want a quick overview of an area’s terrain and land cover. The scale of the photography in rural areas still leaves a lot to be desired.
Competition Good For The Satellite Imagery UserBoth speakers mentioned that they will be joined by several competitors from outside the United States. This will lead to a lot more satellite imagery on the market. They expect satellite imagery to become more of a commodity and less of a special product as a result of this increase in supply. They also expect coverage to improve greatly. For example, they said you might be able to get imagery of a site taken from one company at 4 AM, and another image taken later in the same day, say at 8 PM, from a different company. This will allow GIS practitioners to do interesting things with change-analysis and “temporal GIS”.
I'd look for opportunities for a customer to work with multiple satellite imagery providers to meet this type of coverage and frequency need in satellite imagery. Perhaps middle-man vendors will emerge to provide this type of service to customers that don't want to hassle with purchasing imagery from multiple imager providers.
I think this increase in supply, and hence competition, will be a good thing for the end user of satellite imagery, as we will have more choices and lower prices. It also means that if I was DigitalGlobe or GeoEye that I would want to start thinking about ways to deliver excellent customer service. They’re going to need a way to distinguish themselves from the competition, and I imagine fancy satellites with new technology are pretty expensive. I don’t think it will be too long until we are asking ourselves, “what has my satellite imagery provider done for me lately?”. Perhaps they will consider offering a subscription model.
What if a customer could pay a flat fee for regular updates of imagery within a geographic region. Or perhaps the companies could set up cooperatives that allow interested parties from the same geographic region to share the cost of imagery acquisition.
It will also be interesting to see what this increase in satellite imagery will mean for the more traditional aerial photography providers. Will demand for their services increase, or decrease? Will we see satellite imagery that can compete with aerial photography at smaller and smaller mapping scales?
Satellite Imagery In An Open Format?I asked the second speaker on the seminar, an executive at GeoEye, if the company had a position on the use of proprietary image formats like MRSID for image delivery. I wanted to know if the company was supporting open standards for geospatial image storage. To my surprise the exec was actually familiar with the subject to a limited extent, and responded by my question by saying his company was a member of the
OGC. (That didn’t impress me much, and most of you know what I think of the OGC.) I was pleased to find that the exec had some knowledge of the issue, and that my question didn’t leave him with a puzzled look on his face. I would like to see satellite imagery providers throw their weight behind providing products in an open imagery format like
GeoTIFF. As they look for ways to stand out from the competition perhaps they will invest some dollars in the development of these formats and some open source software to manipulate them. Then again I might be dreaming…
Lot's Of Satellite ImageryIn summary, I think we will be seeing a lot more satellite imagery kicking around in the next few years. Lets hope that the competition is healthy, and that satellite imagery providers will need to find better ways to serve their customers if they are going to stay in business. Maybe they’ll find a way to incorporate open standards or open source software in their efforts to do so.
The Sunburned Surveyor
Posts
