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Wow - I’d heard about the capability before, but actually seeing it in video is like watching Terminator - fun but eerie at the same time.

Thanks for the great link (and also for automatically setting it to the 30 minute mark).

They say that they acquire one million terrabyte a day? Was it a journalist mistake? It sounds like really a lot for 2013, the budgets must be huge...

The raw storage density of a high-end sensing drone was approaching a petabyte even back then, so it is a plausible number if you have a large drone fleet. This roughly matches available COTS flash storage in ultra-dense form factors at the time. Live streams are likely going to be an extract of the captured data but you can always pull the storage array when it lands.

I haven’t done any math on 1.8 billion pixel video feed but I agree. There’s not enough radio bandwidth even for one drone to beam down over a million TB/day.

There's also an excellent RadioLab episode about it:

https://www.wnycstudios.org/story/eye-sky

If you didn't worry about all of the potential for abuse, the ability it provides to help solve crime is pretty compelling.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pP_T45UG1-o&t=30m29s