I knew from some Swiss companies that use satelitte imagery for their websites that those images costs hell of a lot of money. If you ask why, here is a short explanation:
Every user that wants to access that data actually has to pay a license fee (can’t tell you numbers, it is very different). But since no user would pay a fee for using such a service, the websites pay those fees to the satellite image offerers (like Endoxon – in Switzerland, Navteq, DigitalGlobe, NASA and many others).
Google now said how much they payed to “own” the image data: 500 million dollars, just for the data of DigitalGlobe. Others aren’t much cheaper.
The source for this number was an email from Michael T. Jones (Chief Technologist, Google Earth, Maps, Local) to the developers of gaia, a former open source client for Google Earth.
We have in the past and continue to license very expensive data to make Google Earth and Google Maps products. The terms of the license that we signed include a promise by us to prevent anyone from accessing the data other than through Google software. Violations of this promise (such as Gaia source out in the world) not only cost us money and force the disruption by forced upgrade of 100M+ users as we change protocols, they actually put our entire operation at risk since the data providers loose trust that their data, which they sell directly, is out there for free and could put them out of business. Please understand that the Digital Globe satellite cost about $500M so the data is *very* expensive. We are like an iPod for Earth images. If people could get the music out to play on other platforms then the music companies would not allow Apple access to the music in the first place. This is the situation.
I absolutly understand the worries of Google and others if they do not allow to reverse engineer it’s protocol.
To me, it sounds more like the satellite itself—the thing flying in orbit—cost 500 million. The data should be cheaper because Google isn’t the only group purchasing data from them, so the costs (and additionally, profit) are spread out amongst clients.