With Microsoft offering Windows 365 desktop to corporate clients beginning next month, along with their X cloud gaming experience, I don't believe that streaming data for this software is going to use up their bandwidth 

The Photogrammetry seems to use the Bing oblique 45 degree "birds eye view" detailed aerial photography (not satellite these detailed views are taken from an aircraft) which is very expensive to initially fly/photograph and implement.

Once the data is available though, streaming should be no more expensive for MS than for example the cost to YouTube of streaming a video of a 5 year olds birthday party..

Edited July 15, 20214 yr by Glenn Fitzpatrick

Microsoft is going to sell paid updates to Flight Simulator.  It's likely that a portion of the profit on these will cover bandwidth costs, but that would just be a guess.

A cloud business the sheer size of Microsoft's Azure is difficult to comprehend.  The amount of bandwidth they are using to send flight sim addicts some tiles is nothing compared to what business demand from Azure.  I am a software engineer who deals with Azure frequently, and the amount of ingress/egress from these platforms puts tile streaming to shame.

On 7/14/2021 at 7:17 AM, abrams_tank said:

Thus, if MSFS is a 10 year project, we may very well continue to get free satellite/photogrammetry data streaming for the remaining 9 years and the streaming won't be pulled anytime soon (because if it costs very little to Microsoft, it's just bad PR and bad customer service for them to stop the satellite/photogrammetry streaming).

Yeah, I don't think MS is going to stop streaming the scenery any time soon. They've committed to 10 years, and I think they'll honor that. Despite what ISPs who want to charge us stupid amounts of money to use the internet claim, data is not rare or particularly expensive to move from one computer to another. The Azure servers themselves are expensive, but they're doing a lot more than just serving up scenery for us flight sim nerds. The adjusted cost of giving us scenery most likely amounts to a rounding error with the kind of budget numbers Microsoft works with.

I also suspect that in 10 years or so when/if MS does finally decide to cut off the data (most likely because they've come out with MSFS 2030 and have sunsetted 2020) it will not be a big deal to get a couple petabytes worth of storage at home, and we can just download it ourselves. 

After all, I remember a time not terribly long ago when a classmate mentioned he had a gigabyte hard drive, and the rest of us just gaped at him and asked why he would possibly need that much. Within a few years, everyone had a gig or three onboard, and it wasn't long before at-home storage capacity was commonly measured in terabytes. 

Back in 2011 someone wrote an article calculating how much a petabyte worth of hard drives would cost. It came out to something like 90 trillion dollars. Now a decade later you can get a petabyte worth of SSDs for a mere $70,000. Given that rate of price decline, in another 10 years a petabyte is gonna cost about as much as you will pay to fill your gas tank. 😉

 

Edited July 15, 20214 yr by eslader

20 hours ago, fogboundturtle said:

So now that MSFS is getting their duck in a row  and some good airliners are coming, we have now move the goal post to MS is going to stop streaming scenery so don't buy MSFS ? Am I understanding this wrong ?

yes, you're getting it wrong, literally no-one has made that point, we're just having a discussion on how the platform is funded

20 hours ago, tweekz said:

Bad times to be a hater. 😄

hater? 😄

i started the discussion and literally love and own the platform

grow up

On 7/14/2021 at 2:17 PM, abrams_tank said:

the streaming won't be pulled anytime soon (because if it costs very little to Microsoft

Nice read here, seems less expensive than expected even by Jörg Neumann