Open Data as a Price Floor: Sentinel and Landsat
How does free government imagery shape the commercial EO market, and what must paid data offer to compete with it?
Chapter summary
The European Union's Copernicus Sentinels and the US Landsat programme give away imagery at 10–30 m resolution, every few days, for anyone to use.
Key takeaways
- 1
That sets a price floor of zero for medium-resolution monitoring and has created a large community of analytics firms and researchers.
- 2
Paid data must beat free data on at least one axis: resolution (finer than 10 m), revisit (more often than every few days), latency (hours, not days) or capability (SAR at night, hyperspectral).
- 3
Copernicus is being renewed: Sentinel-2C replaced 2A in January 2025 and Sentinel-1D, launched in November 2025, began delivering data in April 2026.
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