Just been thinking about these Multi-Billion Pixel camera...

Just been thinking about these Multi-Billion Pixel camera systems and going through two “What If” scenarios:

Scenario 1: Obviously as described previously, even if another company had developed a very high resolution camera system (ie. in comparison to what Nearmap is currently using) and this company wants to compete with Nearmap then besides having a good camera system this company will also have to demonstrate its capabilities in:

i) mounting these cameras & then taking photos on a plane under rapid motion,
ii) automating the high volume image stitching process,
iii) being able to release these images & all historic images in a usable manner to a large paying user base reliably in high frequencies

A company simply having a billion-pixel camera is no threat to Nearmap’s business.

Scenario 2: Even if another company can somehow mount these billion-pixel cameras onto low orbit satellites and starts to take single snap shots of entire cities, which will then clearly make good use of their capabilities, then in addition to the initial astronomical costs of mounting these camera systems onto Satellites & then launching them into orbit, from an ongoing perspective there is the continuous debate between satellite vs aerial image quality. And regardless of how many billion (or zillion) pixels a camera has, if there is cloud cover or even minor atmospheric abnormalies around the areas being photographed then Satellite images are useless. Besides, imagine how much it will cost to maintain these sensitive & highly precise camera systems once they’ve been launched into orbit? So I wonder if an insurance company will pay an equivalent subscription service that is 100x (or even 1000x) more expensive than Nearmap because they can count the number of scratches on top of cars after a storm?