The MapScaping Podcast's latest episode "The Problem with Satellite Data Is ... That It Is Not A Commodity" is out and we wanted to share it with our parcel community. If you are unfamiliar with The MapScaping Podcast, it is a leader in the geospatial community and covers a wide range of topics including AI, data science, drones, and general career advice. The creator and host Daniel O'Donohue does a fantastic job educating his loyal following and being an inspiration in the community. Our founder and CEO Jerry Paffendorf made a guest appearance on the previous episode "Polygons of Ownership" to share his area of expertise, parcel data.
Host Daniel and his guest, Joe Morrison (Vice President of Commercial Products at Umbra) discuss if satellite imagery is a commodity - hint: it isn't. Listen to the whole thing below, and make sure to subscribe to the MapScaping podcast if you don't already!
A snippet from the podcast:
Joe Morrison: If you only ever talk to venture capitalists in the investment space. Or startups doing analytics on satellite imagery - it's a really common thing you'll hear. "Satellite imagery is being commoditized, it's getting super cheap, super plentiful, super accessible..." and none of that is true. So, if that were true, the joke I always say commodities are things that you can buy easily, so I say good luck buying high-resolution satellite imagery. I don't know. Have you ever tried to purchase satellite data? I'm mainly talking about optical imagery. There are other types of satellite imagery. When most people think of satellite imagery they think of aerial imagery. Because when they go on Google Maps and flip on the satellite imagery layer, god bless the product manager that chose to call it satellite imagery when the majority of the imagery is aerial imagery. You zoom to your city and it's super high resolution, and you think that's satellite imagery. In fact, the highest resolution on commercial satellite imagery is around 30cm.
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