The third presentation from Alumni Day was Urthecast. They described their business model which included how their revenue streams were organized and their forecast of how they were to fund all the operations through selling customized footage of important events. I thought that some of the assumptions made during the presentation was questionable. For example, why would the government or private enterprises/news stations pay money to acquire photos and videos when its accessible to the public for free? A possible answer would be that the photos are only free for private use but can only be used commercially (news report and ads) through paying a fee to urthecast.com in which they would earn revenues.
On the other hand, it seems that the target market of the live streaming from space is quite limited. The view from space would not be edited/glorified and thus wouldn’t provide attractive feel-good imagery/videos of our delicate planet which is what interests most people. At the same time, it’s important to address the blandness of seeing predictable landscapes and similar imagery as the cameras orbit the Earth. It just seems like an unconventional habit to observe a camera pictures without any specific target – building on Eric Cho’s blog post giving feedback on urthecast, most people just don’t have that free time or interest. However, I am open to the possibility of it catching on as a trendy internet hotspot for people to visit whenever they’re casually browsing the net. It may turn out that students are eager to use images taken from space on urthecast.com to compliment their projects when mentioning a particular location/landscape to emphasize their point. That would be a great use of resources and personal creation of primary picture resources which adds value to their project. The success of innovative businesses don’t always follow forecasts and can take unexpected turns – for the better or worse.