Disclaimer: Written on March 30, 2023, based on information available to the public. I have no ties to any of the companies or institutions mentioned below.

For those who need no context or an intro to Sinergise, skip to the next section!

Setting the Scene: Planet and Sinergise

Ever since they become a public company after what many would consider a successful SPAC deal, Planet (NYSE: PL) has been on an acquisition spree:

• In 2021, they acquired Dutch startup Vandersat doubling down on their focus on agriculture and adjacent insurance markets;

• In 2022, they acquired San Francisco-based carbon monitoring startup Salo Sciences;

• And, yesterday came the announcement of Planet acquiring Slovenian geospatial IT company Sinergise, most well-known for their Earth observation (EO) data platform, Sentinel Hub.

I will hypothesise on the direction Planet is trying to take, in a bit. But, first, let’s take a quick look at Sinergise.

Sinergise - A Specialist in Solving The Most Important, Impactful, Boring Problems in EO

If you have read my stuff before, you know what I mean by “boring problems” - the ones that do not make the news, the ones that very few want to solve, and the ones, unless solved, will considerably limit the adoption of EO and the growth of the sector. Sinergise has been working on some of the most important boring problems in EO.

Note: Throughout this blog post, I will be using Sentinel Hub and Sinergise somewhat interchangeably, but Sinergise is the parent company.

Founded by “non-remote sensing professionals”, Sinergise has been around since 2008, building turnkey geospatial solutions focused on agriculture and real-estate administration systems. But, they really burst onto the scene with the Sentinel Hub platform, a data access, processing, and visualisation engine for EO data, that specifically started with data from the Sentinel satellites of the Copernicus programme, led and funded the EU (implemented by ESA). Some bullet points on the key attributes of Sinergise’s business:

• Sentinel Hub: As the first of its kind, Sentinel Hub revolutionised the way the EO community accessed, processed, and visualised satellite data, especially data from the Sentinel satellites, which is the starting point for most remote sensing users. Thanks to the company’s close relationship with ESA and the European Commission, Sentinel Hub evolved simultaneously based on the requirements of the institutions and the needs of the users (a good combination for any company). Today, despite the growth of several companies in the “EO Platform” layer and the entry of big tech (AWS, Google, Microsoft), Sentinel Hub continues to bring something to the table, particularly with respect to making EO data analysis-ready.

• Agriculture Solutions: While Sentinel Hub probably gets most of the attention, Sinergise also has a thriving business in the agriculture sector. Thanks to their experience in working with the sector, and the suitability of technology they were working on with Sentinel Hub for this sector, several institutional use cases were unlocked - especially wide-area monitoring of farms related to the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy. This is definitely in Planet’s area of interest, given it is a key vertical for them.

• Public Funding: As Grega mentioned on the podcast, Sinergise has many commercial customers, but from its founding days to the present day, Sinergise (aka Sentinel Hub) has benefitted a lot from public money, both from grants and contracts from the European Commission and the ESA. But, it is important to note that EO, in general, is very dependent on public funding, whether it is the DoD contracts in the US or EU funding in Europe. So, there is no surprise how Sinergise has come to grow over the years.

• Enabling Democratisation and Open Science: The company has a successful history of enabling open science - whether it is through open-sourcing the cloud detection algorithm, which has been instrumental for cloud masking and removing cloud shadows, and integrated into Google Earth Engine, or developing EO Browser, a (free) satellite imagery visualisation tool that allows users to play around with EO data and gain an understanding of remote sensing applications, which eventually help them decide on a course of action for adopting and using EO.

I think that should give you enough to get some context, I may have missed other details. So, feel free to let me know in the comments!

What This Acquisition Means

For Planet, For Sinergise/Sentinel Hub, For Europe, and For the EO Community

For Planet

Planet has been operating in Europe for a while now, with a large team in Berlin. Even though they are a US-based company (and now a publicly traded company on NYSE), they have had some success so far in winning public contracts from ESA, the European Commission, and national governments (see here, here, here, and here). The acquisition of Dutch startup Vandersat reinforced their European plans helping them gain another base in the Netherlands.

For Planet, I think, this acquisition brings about three important things:

1. Entry into the European institutional market enabled by Sinergise, is an important milestone as Planet looks to scale internationally. Even though they have been a contributor to the Copernicus programme, joining hands with Sinergise will make Planet a strategic asset for Copernicus, especially for the data management and processing segment (see this contract). While whether the partnership will continue as usual is more a political question1 than anything, I imagine it is in nobody’s interest to make drastic moves - definitely not in the planet’s (the Earth!) and the people’s interests.

2. A foundational technology platform to build and distribute analysis-ready data enabled by everything Sinergise has worked on so far, whether it is on the Copernicus programme, their integrations of Planet, Airbus, Maxar onto Sentinel Hub, and several other bespoke EO data preprocessing solutions that they may have built in the past (see Sentinel Hub capabilities).

   1. A data distribution channel, given that Sentinel Hub acts as a marketplace providing access to data from other EO data providers along with Sentinel and Planet (Airbus and Maxar via EUSI). I would suspect the other data providers would quietly disappear from the marketplace, while Planet gains access to the customers who have relied on Sentinel Hub for data acquisition, processing, and analysis.

3. A multidisciplinary team to enable the shift towards making EO data usable, given that Sinergise’s staff are not only remote sensing specialists but are also software engineers, solution architects, cloud developers, and more. In fact, I believe that this might be the most important highlight of the acquisition, over the other two, simply because of the years of relevant work experience in EO that Sinergise’s team will bring to Planet.

Personally, I like this move for Planet as this was not the most obvious strategic direction to take. An easy direction would have been to acquire another EO company building a new type of sensor (whether it is SAR or thermal or otherwise). But, moving down the value chain, and enabling the creation of the necessary building blocks in EO could be good for the entire sector (as long as they do not follow a lock-in sales strategy!).

For Sinergise/Sentinel Hub

Sinergise has been a success story in European Earth Observation over the last seven years, and I suspect they would want to keep growing sustainably. As far as I am aware they haven’t raised private funding, have been able to keep afloat through their ongoing contracts, and continue to build the platform and solutions over the years, which gives a hint into Grega and his team’s thought process. While this acquisition does come as a surprise to me, having interacted with Grega over the years, from the lenses of continued growth and realisable impact, this makes sense.

Therefore, for Sinergise, I think, this brings about two important things:

1. Opportunity to reinforce their positioning as a leader in EO data preprocessing, processing, and analysis for optical/multispectral, SAR, and potentially hyperspectral satellite imagery along with the opportunity to invest in their platform through Planet, which so far has relied on requirements and financing through public funding.

2. Potential to become a leader in the development of commercial analysis-ready-data, enabled by access to Planet’s multi-sensor imagery as well as the potential of exploring and exploiting synergies with Planetary Variables, which goes more down the value chain and provides usable, data products to end-users.

For Europe

While this is the second such acquisition of an EO company in Europe by an American counterpart, this one must be a harder pill to swallow, given how much public funding has fuelled the growth of Sinergise. This has been rightly highlighted and analysed in social media discussions, but, I think there are two sides to the coin to this analysis.

• It is bad for Europe: This is the easy answer as clearly not many in Europe would be thrilled to hear yet another successful company being bought out by a larger American one for strategic/growth reasons, which is fair. But I think this just goes to highlight the already-known and well-documented problems of lack of growth stage support and corporate investment models. Hypothetically, if Sinergise had wanted to scale and invest in their platform in order to have more impact, I doubt if they would have found suitable private investors or corporate partners who would have understood their business and given them the freedom they need to continue building their platform. While public funding kept Sinergise going, I doubt whether they could do more than what they already do. So, in short, as one Arjen Vrielink opined on Twitter, “The Copernicus program not failing, EU public investment is not failing and US corporate investment is not failing.”

• It can be good for Europe: While I am fully onboard the rationale provided above and I buy that argument to an extent, from the lens of long-term growth and realisable impact, I have a feeling this could be good for Europe. Here is my argument: What Europe has been desperately lacking is growth in the downstream market i.e. the need for successful companies that make use of data from the Copernicus programme. Although there are some success stories, compared to the amount of Earth observation data generated by Sentinels, the number of companies remains low, in my opinion. And one reason for that, I think, is the lack of usable, analysis-ready EO data with a low barrier to adoption. And this is exactly, what I hope, a Planet-backed Sinergise can bring to Europe, which might in turn, grow the industry in Europe (but as I said, that’s my hope).

For the EO Community

The EO community is special. Although I have been working in EO only for the last 6 years, and I am a relative outsider to this sector, I have been surprised at how much, almost everyone who works in this sector, wants to contribute to making an impact. Naturally, this development is going to make one half of the community happy while the other half is going to be unhappy or perhaps feel uncertain about the future of Sinergise.

Given how much this small company from Slovenia has contributed to open science and prioritised impact over growth over the years, the tendency to question this acquisition and be uncertain of its strategy is quite normal. Some have started (and rightly so) questioning whether Planet will keep and maintain Sinergise’s open-source code, while others wonder if Sentinel Hub’s friendly business model will continue.

I think that it is certainly not in Planet’s interest to change any of the above as their interests are quite the same as the EO community. They would like to see an increase in the adoption of EO - in fact, their entire business case rests on making data available and usable by the EO community. They have taken and led several important steps toward that, so I do not see any reason to believe they might surprise anyone (of course, there is a chance they can). But, I would like to stick to the positive sides of this. Sinergise is too impactful as a company in EO for Planet to come in and change things dramatically.

While I have some opinions about what constitutes an ideal EO platform company (e.g. independent of any data provider, to start with), I will reserve those for my deep-dive on platforms. As an independent consultant and EO evangelist, who is solely passionate about improving the awareness and adoption of EO data, with no ties to any company or institution, I view this as a welcome development, coupled with some caution. Good companies do not resort to growth strategies that go against the wishes of their core audience, and I definitely think Planet is a good one. Expect some great things out of this!

PS. Zooming out on this, I am generally of the opinion that leading and supporting open science is a fundamental need for the growth of the EO sector. But, while open science is a necessary condition for its growth, I do not believe it is a sufficient condition. We need models that can work long-term and can guarantee financial sustainability simply because of the importance of open science to not only the social and environmental impacts of EO but also its commercial value. While public funding guarantees this and will continue to, I hope as a community we can figure out new operational models, that involve the private sector and can do so, on a level playing field.

Jed Sundwall, the Executive Director of Radiant Earth Foundation touched on this in our podcast conversation. Take a listen, if you are interested!

Until next time,

Aravind.

Although I briefly explain the methodology that I use for the analysis below, I obviously did not put in the work that I would for one of my consulting projects. In fact, I did most of the work for this piece was over two transatlantic flights. Your thoughts and feedbacks are welcome, but please keep the context of this piece in mind.

Context

More than a couple years ago, I published the first edition of the Earth Observation Hype Cycle, in an attempt to provide some analysis on the various trends and technologies within the Earth observation (EO) sector. I had compared, the times we were living back then to an iPhone moment. While we are far from realising that utopian moment that I write about, I believe we are getting close. This decade might really be the do-or-die moment for EO.

Similar to how the iPhone enabled the creation of apps for various use cases, satellite data will enable the creation of different applications. Similar to how the iPhone brought all the innovations into one device, satellites are now on the verge of bringing all the types of data of our planet and our activities on it into one place. Similar to how the multi-billion, multi-vertical app economy was catalysed by the iPhone, we are on the verge of creating multi-billion, multi-vertical applications by data from satellites.

TerraWatch Space Insights

The iPhone Moment for the Space Industry: Dealing with The Hype around Earth Observation

The iPhone Moment for Data from Space: Dealing with The Hype around Earth Observation Disclaimer: This article is not a professional write-up or a sponsored blog, but rather the ramblings of an Earth …

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5 years ago · 5 likes · Aravind

Pre-Read: The Gartner Hype Cycle

I have looked into various frameworks to deal with innovation hypes across sectors. Gartner, one of the popular ones, is probably the best fit simply for the simplicity it offers. Although subject to a lot of criticism over the years, it is a good starting point, especially if you are an outsider looking into a new field (which I presume some of you are).

Here is a summary of how to read and understand the “Hype Cycle”, but I would recommend you refer to the official Gartner methodology for a detailed explanation:

Axes

• Time: Each innovation progresses through time, over various phases

• Expectations: A qualitative measure of expectations in the market for a specific innovation, based on commercial interest and investment in the innovation and visibility in the sector

Phases

• Innovation Trigger: A technology/product innovation is announced and starts to generate interest;

• Peak of Inflated Expectations: Expectations reach its maximum and the innovation creates a lot of buzz, sometimes leading to a bubble;

• Trough of Disillusionment: Some innovations don’t show results commercially — interest wanes and investment dries up (i.e. the bubble bursts, for some);

• Slope of Enlightenment: Those innovations that sustained or escaped the decline (with proper technology-product-market fit) start to show results, leading to more understanding of the commercial feasibility of an innovation;

• Plateau of Productivity: Mainstream adoption of innovation happens leading to increased commercial value and the promised J curves start to come true.

Earth Observation Technology Hype Cycle

I then made a non-exhaustive list of the ongoing innovations in the EO sector to be positioned on the Hype Cycle. I used the following criteria to analyse and position the innovations on the Hype Cycle:

• Investment: Level of funding raised, from private funding - Pretty easy to access this data and rank relatively as Low-Medium-High;

• Adoption: Level of adoption of the innovation by end-users or within the EO value chain - Not straightforward, used a combination of public information about contracts and proxies to rank relatively as Low-Medium-High;

• Hype: Level of buzz that the innovation has already created within the EO sector and the wider space industry - Also not straightforward, but I used proxies such as amount of media coverage and importance given in conferences and then ranked relatively as Low-Medium-High

Some things to keep in mind before getting to the results:

1. The innovations considered represent satellite-based remote sensing innovations only1.

2. This analysis only focuses on the commercial EO market and does not, in any way, evaluate ongoing research and development via public funding2.

3. For the sake of simplicity, the analysis is also looking at the state of EO sector from a commercial lens, not from a defense point of view3.

4. Being part of the “hype” is not essentially bad, as long as the hype is complemented by actual execution that pushes the adoption forward.

5. Lastly, yes, analysts get most things wrong4, I try my best not to be.

Highlights

While I have a lot to say about every single one of the innovations on the figure, I will keep this concise and just emphasise some key points.

The Foreground Innovations (EO Sensors)

• Starting with the most obvious one out of them all, “Optical/Multispectral”: While this technology has been around for decades, and you can make an argument that it is actually mainstream (due to its adoption in mapping), I would opine that there is still a long way to do in terms of converting potential to impact and transforming pilots into subscriptions. I have seen more examples of the former than the latter, especially in relation to the other two criteria I use for the analysis (Investment and Hype).

• Two sensors - SAR and Hyperspectral - are close to reaching the peak of expectations (that’s a good thing). We can leverage the buzz created to learn more about the challenges of adoption and see how to best escape the “chasm.” Given where we are in the adoption of EO, and the likelihood of a fused, sensor-agnostic end product there is a very good chance that the sensors feed into each other and stop all of them from falling into the trough (rising tide lifts all boats).

The Background Innovations (Enabling Technologies)

• If I have to name two innovations that will drive the medium-term future of the sector, I would say EO Edge computing and Inter-Satellite Links, simply due to the difference in potential they bring about. I will have deep-dives on each of them over the year, but I am a big fan of Disruptive Innovation. And, I think those two could disrupt status quo in EO, in their best-case scenarios.

• I have been fascinated with EO Synthetic Data for a while, not just for its commercial potential, but for the science. There has been some movement in the market on its adoption within EO (see its use in the Chinese balloon example), and I expect this to grow as the sensors evolve through their hype cycle, due to the complementarity they offer to every sensor.

The Other Innovations (Trends Under the Radar)

• There are two areas where I see very little hype today, but expect more in the future. The first one is EO Data Products, or as I call it, "useful, usable data products5” derived from EO. If you buy into my thesis that EO products will be built by tens of thousands of people, but it will be used by hundreds of millions of people, we need more data products. And the first company that started this trend is Planet, with their announcement of Planetary Variables.

• The second area is innovations happening within weather. While meteorology is its own industry and requires its own hype cycle, I included three innovations on the list - Radio Occultation, Precipitation Radars and Microwave Sounders. Like many other weather-based remote sensing technologies, these instruments have been in use for decades, but the entry of private sector is going to generate more hype in the next few years.

Bottomline

While I was wondering how to best summarise my thoughts on the state of EO as a conclusion to this analysis, I went back and read my piece from three years back. Judge all you want, but I am just going paste my thoughts from back then, as they resonate as much as they did almost three years ago.

Do I really think all the innovations will make it past the trough of disillusionment? No, but I hope that they do in some form or the other. I am not a pessimist, in fact, I am quite the opposite. I switched careers to get into this industry because I am sincerely passionate and excited about the potential of applications of satellite data. The dreamer inside me believes that Earth observation data will definitely unlock multiple multi-billion-dollar markets across verticals, traversing throughout the value chain with benefits becoming harder to quantify — similar to how data from navigation satellites have become the core of the app economy. Just like how the unicorns of the past decade— Uber, Instacart and Tinder etc. — are not considered space-tech companies (but still heavily rely on space technologies), I believe the unicorns of the next decade will start to rely on Earth observation data based on some of the innovations mentioned above. We just need to make sure we do not slide through the trough and let the bubble burst. I am convinced that we are passing through the iPhone moment for Earth observation.

Earth Observation Adoption Hype Cycle

While the Gartner Hype Cycle is most suited for analysing technologies, and the Technology Adoption Curve by Geoffrey Moore is most suited for analysing adoption of technologies, I decided to change things a little bit.

How would some major use cases of EO fare if they were analysed through the same framework as the technology? More specifically, which applications of EO, triggered due to the innovations, are likely to become mainstream?

And, that is what I decided to represent through this figure.

Highlights

• Mainstream applications of EO that are, partially, or in most cases, entirely enabled by data from governmental EO satellites including air quality, disaster response, mapping and weather forecasting are likely to benefit from several of the commercial innovations that we discussed previously. It would be fair to say that these are the low-hanging fruits that the successful innovations would hope to capture as they move through the tech hype cycle.

• Climate change (an umbrella term for several applications on the figure) is accelerating the demand for EO, whether it is to complement data from public EO missions or directly enabling use cases that were not possible before. I have written about this subject in detail before, but what I am excited to see is how much commercial EO will play a role in areas where governmental EO missions have been the benchmark (think emissions, weather, climate science, carbon stock takes and the like).

• It is important to acknowledge that adoption of EO within some use cases is most likely going to fall into the trough of disillusionment, simply because alternative data sources (remotely sensed or otherwise) solve the problem more effectively and cost efficiently. Wherever possible, I hope EO takes a seat in the background, and show its value on-demand.

Bottomline

Once again, I am going to use points that I had made three years ago, to convey my thoughts on adoption of EO, as I believe, they are still valid. I invite you to read my thoughts from last time, if you need more context, but I think they are pretty self-explanatory.

1. Insights, not pixels

2. Solve problems using satellite data, not hoping for satellite data to solve some problems

3. Evangelise and democratise

I will end with three points that have become fundamental to my thesis in EO ever since I officially launched TerraWatch Space last year.

• The Importance of Being Impact Driven

It's not about whether we should be selling data, analytics, insights or products. It is not about a specific type of sensor (hyperspectral vs infrared vs SAR vs Lidar), not about a specific medium (satellite vs aerial vs in-situ), not about EO vs weather vs GNSS, and certainly not terminologies such as geospatial or spatial or location intelligence. It is about the impact of EO for the customers, how it helps them get their job done, and in that process help solve larger environmental, societal, and economic challenges of our time.

• The Need for the Advisory Layer in EO

Users just want to get their job done, and perhaps EO can enable that. But, no single entity or organisation is incentivised to be holistic and objective today. Every EO company today is incentivised to push their own technology and products (and rightfully so), but it is my belief that most problems for customers cannot be solved without an objective, holistic view of the entire EO market, which only an advisory layer can solve.

• Let’s Not Forget the Other Two A’s

All of this analysis was about the technology innovations, making them available for use and evaluating their success. In my three A’s framework made up of Availability, Awareness and Adoption, the second and third A’s are more likely to be forgotten. It is perhaps important to remind ourselves that the Availability of a technology will not guarantee Adoption. Just because a sensor is in orbit it will not be used. So, as we focus on the innovations, I hope we spend some time thinking about how to best make users aware of the benefits of the technology (the so what) and think of ways to support its adoption (the how).

Thanks for reading!

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Until next time,

Aravind

Disclaimer: This article is not a professional write-up or a sponsored blog, but rather the ramblings of an Earth …

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Confinement in the last few weeks gave me some time to reflect on a few things and transform these thoughts into words. So, this series is…

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This is not a professional write-up, but rather some raw ramblings of an Earth observation enthusiast.

Increasing Search Costs in Video Streaming

So, you decide to sign up for a video streaming service provider because you finally discover you have a couple more hours per day, because you do not have to commute to work. Or, you are already a subscriber to a few (or all) of them, so you decide to watch something to spend the extra time you did not think you would have. These are the options (see figure above) that you are faced with (depending on where you live, this could be more or fewer). You think to yourself:

These video streaming companies were supposed to make my life easier, aggregating content on to a single platform, and reduce my overall search costs. Are they doing it?

Video Streaming and Earth Observation

I worked in the software industry for a few years, including a couple of years at Amazon (whose value proposition is to reduce the search costs for products) after which I decided to take the plunge into the space sector. As I began this unexpected journey, I developed a keen interest in Earth Observation (EO), the domain of space that deals with satellites that monitor the Earth and generate a lot of data leading to some insights that I did not associate with space before. I was amazed and found this to be revolutionary. I did not know you could monitor changes on Earth over time and visualise that from space. I did not know you can use satellite images from the night to calculate economic growth models based on “night lights”. I did not know you could use data from satellites and count the cars in parking lots to provide input to consumer spending models. This timing of my interest in EO also coincided with the growing EO sector, with hundreds of satellites being launched every year, meaning petabytes of data were being collected every day. So, I am not entirely surprised that we see more satellite imagery around us than ever before in the news media, even from Donald Trump.

So, I wanted to spread the word. I became an Earth Observation evangelist if you will. I gave talks to students in schools and universities in India, France, Mexico and Australia. I participated in conferences and talked about on how satellites could be useful and encouraged people to “think out of the (box) atmosphere”.

Thankfully, at that time, my daily job involved doing a similar type of evangelisation for EO across end-user organisations. As a result, I got a lot of interest from people from the non-EO community who were surprised to know about all this technology and wanted to know more. And they asked me some simple questions, which I still have trouble giving short and simple answers to. They ask me:

So, how can I find and access satellite data? Do you recommend a tool I can use to perform some analysis on satellite data? How much does it cost?

The answer to all those questions unfortunately is, “It depends.”

It is not because I have put on my consultant hat, but it really depends on:

• What problem are you trying to solve?

• What is the spatial resolution do you need? What is the frequency of imagery you want (hourly, daily or every few days)?

• Do you want data downloaded from satellites in real-time or do you want to use archived imagery?

• What is your budget — if you want to use free data, there are a few ways of doing that and if you want to buy satellite data, there are a bunch of companies that provide different types of data to solve different problems.

Let us assume that you have patiently listened to my responses and understood the nuances. Now you are ready to go access some data and start building those applications. Alas! How do you choose?

The choice of satellite data providers (see examples below) is what you are faced with. Here is where I go back to my video streaming analogy. Similar to the options there, each of these providers below has its own differentiating content. Netflix offers ‘Lost in Space’, Amazon offers ‘The Expanse’, Disney offers ‘Star Wars’ while HBO offers ‘Game of Thrones.’ Similarly, Maxar offers 30 cm resolution, Planet offers daily frequency, Iceye offers radar data and Copernicus is free. As with the former case, each of the satellite data providers have great content i.e. data. Each of them offers different types and configurations of data which are all essential components for solving various industrial, policy-based and environmental use cases.

However, there is one major difference. Video streaming does not suffer from a lack of awareness, most digital consumers are aware of these brands. Earth Observation is still in its early stages.

Another analogy: Earth Observation is where the internet was in the early 2000s — you had this technology called web browsers and you had options of Internet Explorer, Netscape, Amaya, Safari, Opera and Mozilla Firefox. Very few people knew what they were for and how to use them.

The applications, complexities and nuisances of EO data are very well-known within the bubble of the EO sector and its traditional users such as the military and governmental institutions and partially for the agriculture and insurance sectors. Outside this, however, search costs become enormously high due to the complexity of the type of data offered, the unstandardised business models (per sq. km or volume-based or yearly subscriptions) as well as the said lack of awareness.

Yes, EO was supposed to solve a lot of important problems, but in the end, it looks like it created additional problems - almost its own version of obstacle games - in order to be able to leverage EO to solve those important problems.

Way Forward

I can think of a few approaches that will play a role in the uptake of EO data. As an EO evangelist, I do want more people to discover the potential of this data, either directly or indirectly.

1. Aggregators / Marketplaces:

Marketplaces aggregate content from different satellite data providers and act as a single point of access for satellite data. Although an “Amazon for EO data” does not exist yet, some start-ups are taking this path — Airbus’ Up42, Astraea, SkyWatch, Arlula, Maxar’s GBDX & Google Earth Engine, to name a few. However, the lack of interest from some satellite data providers in the marketplace model coupled with the complexity of sorting out the already complex satellite imagery business models, makes this approach challenging.

Still, I remain very enthusiastic about this direct approach. I hope, sometime in the future, there will be an Android-like framework for EO data, where one can get access to different types of satellite data (and possibly other types of data), develop various sorts of applications and release them into an EO app store (like a Google Play).

2. Insights-as-a-Service (IaaS):

An indirect approach to increasing EO data uptake is to filter out the complexity and avoid search costs for customers by just offering insights from satellite data (raw numbers downloadable as tables. This is exactly what companies such as Orbital Insight, Descartes Labs, SpaceKnow and Ursa Space Systems offer. They extract data from satellites, combine that with other sources of data and offer answers to some key questions. Some companies such as BlackSky are taking this route from scratch, and many other data providers are also jumping on this bandwagon. This approach simplifies the business model (almost SaaS-like) and does not require interested parties to fully understand what spatial resolution, spectral resolution and revisit time mean. However, different parties require different answers and the challenge is in identifying these key scalable use cases.

3. Consultancies / Advisory Firms:

Or, perhaps, the answer is somewhere in the middle. Perhaps, interested parties do not need to know much about EO data, they just want answers to questions. EO data could be just one of the types of data used to build models that could help in answering the big questions for organisations. As far as the consultancies and advisory firms justify these costs, the customers are happy and they do not have to get into the complexities I described above. Organisations might just choose to outsource this part to consultancies and advisory firms, and trust them in doing the right thing for them. Would this approach increase the use of EO data exponentially? Probably not, but at least it could be used in circumstances that fit well, with the right approach.

Conclusion

As it happens in any industry, I expect some consolidation in the next few years, which should bring down the choices available for end customers. Maybe there will not be so many choices in front of us, both for video streaming and for EO. Maybe there will be an aggregator service (a single-point solution) for video streaming. In the case of EO, perhaps the business model and value proposition will become easy enough to explain in one slide and the uptake will rapidly improve.

OR, it could also be the case that none of this is a problem worth talking about because it is not a big deal. People will continue to subscribe to the video streaming services of their choice and likewise, maybe the use of EO data will grow organically, by continuing the status quo and things will be figured out.

As for me, I think I want to watch some comedy, so I am going to go search for interesting shows on Netflix, Amazon, Disney, HBO etc.

Until next time!