The Economics of Daily Global Imaging
Is imaging the whole Earth every day a good business, and what did the Dove experiment teach the industry?
Chapter summary
Planet's Dove constellation proved that cheap small satellites could image all of the Earth's land every day at about 3 m resolution, building a unique record.
Key takeaways
- 1
But daily global coverage produced far more imagery than customers would pay for, and early hopes that thousands of commercial customers would subscribe were only partly realised.
- 2
The data's value turned out to lie in specific uses (agriculture analytics, government monitoring, change detection) and, increasingly, in its archive as AI training data.
- 3
The lesson for the industry: coverage is cheap to create but expensive to sell; revenue follows decisions, not pixels.
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