Intellectual Ventures spin-out company EarthNow has revealed a plan to launch a constellation of advanced imaging satellites to stream live continuous video of most of the world.

EarthNow recently completed the first round of funding to support its plan.

The financing round saw the participation of Airbus and SoftBank Group, as well as Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, and OneWeb founder and executive chairman Greg Wyler.

Initial funding will primarily be used to mature the overall system design to provide new and improved real-time Earth observation services.

EarthNow founder and CEO Russell Hannigan said: “We believe the ability to see and understand the Earth live and unfiltered will help all of us better appreciate and ultimately care for our one and only home.

“EarthNow is also planning to create ‘live Earth video’ applications that can be accessed instantly from a smartphone or tablet.”

“With existing systems, users can see only what has happened in the past.

“With EarthNow’s constellation of satellites, you will see events unfold as they happen in real-time.”

EarthNow is set to benefit from an updated version of the satellite platform or bus, developed originally for OneWeb’s satellite communications service.

Each of the new EarthNow satellites will feature additional on-board processing power, including more CPU cores compared to the combined power of other commercial satellites.

Airbus will mass-produce the satellites at its production lines in Toulouse, France and Florida, US.

Once developed, the EarthNow satellites will provide commercial video and intelligent vision services to various government and enterprise customers.

The services will be used for detecting illegal fishing, observing the development of hurricanes and typhoons, locating forest fires, and monitoring conflict zones around the world amongst others applications.

EarthNow is also planning to create ‘live Earth video’ applications that can be accessed instantly from a smartphone or tablet.