When it introduced the evolved version of Streetside with the new Silverlight-based Bing Maps Beta at the start of December 2009, Microsoft promised that it would deliver additional coverage beyond what was initially available. By the end of 2009, the Redmond company started living up to its promise. The Bing Maps Imagery Release, December 2009, brings to the table a consistent update in terms of content to Streetside. Essentially, the software giant made available in excess of 1.1 TB of new imagery to users of Bing Maps Beta, according to Chris Pendleton, the Bing Maps technical evangelist for Microsoft.

“We added 1.1 TB of new Streetside imagery of which I’ll get you the location details in [the] future,” Pendleton stated, revealing that the December update to Bing Maps was in no way limited to just Streetside. In fact, users will be able to take advantage of increased coverage for Bing Maps, over 270,000 square kilometers of imagery have been added to the company’s mapping, search and location platform.

“Another month goes by and another few hundred thousand square kilometers of Bing Maps imagery hits the web – more than 274,000 square kilometers in fact. December was a big month for Bird’s Eye and although we just launched Streetside, we’ll continue to add more cities every month. We added / updated 27 counties across Texas, Pennsylvania, Michigan, New Jersey, Virginia, South Carolina, Illinois, Washington D.C. and Oklahoma with fresh new Bird’s Eye photos (33,520 sq. km.). 151 cities across Russia, Poland and Turkey were updated with new aerial (ortho) imagery (240,739 sq. km.),” Pendleton added.

Streetside was initially introduced in a technology preview of Live Search Maps which was made available back in 2006. The Bing Maps feature allows end users to leverage Silverlight 3’s 3D capabilities in order to virtually walk the streets of cities around the world for which street-level imagery has been added to the mapping service.