Ah, yes, the ubiquitous eyes in the sky. If you live in a large enough city, you probably have major-network TV stations. If you have those stations, you probably have news helicopters.
I have no clue how many of them there are in the country, but Portland, OR is about the 20th-largest city in size (Metro region) at about 1.2 million people, and we have 5 of them which I know about, one for each major network, and the ABC affiliate has two.
Most of these choppers are modern, turbine driven models, the Hughes 500-series predominating. Most are equipped with a gyro-stabilized "chin" camera with a VERY good zoom lens on it. They do marvelous work from 3,000-5,000 feet above ground level, and the pictures we get on our HD sets are very high quality.
On to commercial videography.
If you've ever hung with news crews, and as a patrol cop that happened to me a lot, you know that the camera people are ALWAYS shooting footage. Stock footage, file footage, practice footage as well as the actual news footage which will be shown. I doubt if it is any different with the news choppers. If I were operating one, I would probably run the camera most of the time, with the lens generally aimed at some item of interest: the airport, freeways, the river, whatever I happened to be flying near. Again, it's a matter of practice to be able to train and elevate that camera and get it properly focused, AND fly the bird, and there are no simulators, so the practice has to be done in a real news chopper.
The zinger.
What happens to all that footage taken from on high? Does it just get erased, or does it all get stored? Hard drive space is very cheap now, with a terabyte costing less than $100 bucks.
The what-ifs.
What if there was a geo-stamping program for that digital footage? So that the area being focused on could be identified with coordinates? What if all those geostamps could be organized onto a spreadsheet, giving a reference to a particular set of coordinates? That's basically how Google Earth works, so the technology is out there. What if the Government was interested in that footage to compile it, maybe only interested in certain coordinates of persons and places they would like to have more information on? Could they get it from the TV stations?
I see a danger here. Do you?
