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New countries added on Bing Streetside

Remember Bing Streetside? Well it's back with lot of new contents!

Update 2022/02/26: Streetside coverage was added in Puerto Rico, US Virgin Islands, Hawai’i and Alaska.

Recently Microsoft started adding new data to its street view service, Streetside. This is quite a surprise as Streetside was inactive for years and all of sudden new countries started appearing, including countries not covered by Google Street View.

South Africa was the first country to appear with coverage near Cape Town. Eventually the whole country was added. In the meanwhile many other countries in southern Africa were added: Botswana, Lesotho, eSwatini, Mozambique, Zimbabwe and Zambia. The imagery is not made by Microsoft but by TomTom and unfortunately the quality is quite poor.

Streetside coverage in Africa

As you can see some of the countries are not available on Google Street View: Zimbabwe, Zambia and Mozambique. Considering TomTom is a quite smaller company than Google this shows how much Google could cover if they were motivated enough.

A few days later new countries were added in Asia: Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam and the Philippines.

Streetside coverage in Asia

Again some areas are not available on Google Street View, like Aceh in Indonesia. Conversely the island on Mindanao in the Philippines is not on Bing Streetside but is on Google Street View. But the major difference is Vietnam which is available as a whole on Streetside while the very small coverage that was visible on Street View got removed in September. This shows coverage could be published in this country and Google did drive cars there in the past.

Most of the imagery was done by TomTom but in Vietnam the car does not bear TomTom’s logo and the quality is a bit different so possible it was done by another company, maybe Bing itself.

The latest continent to receive Streetside is South America: Brazil, Argentina and Chile were added to the service.

Streetside coverage in South America

Again imagery is done by TomTom, with similar quality than the other recently added countries listed above. Most of the covered areas are already available on Google Street View however some places are not, such as the area close to French Guyana in the northern state of Amapá or the southern part of Chile on the Tierra del Fuego region. Coverage in Chile seems more complete on Streetside but in Argentina Google is way more complete.

Overall the coverage of Streetside is starting to look interesting despite of the low imagery quality. As a reminder, Streetside was widely available in the United States and some areas in Canada, United Kingdom, France and Spain were covered. Here is a picture of the global coverage, before and after the latest additions:

What for the next? Microsoft seems to revive Streetside and we can expect more countries to be added thanks to TomTom’s data. Europe may be the next area to be completed, or Australia and New Zealand. Other choices would be Mexico, Colombia, Peru or more African countries. After all TomTom did cover countries such as Zimbabwe despite of safety concerns. To be aware of the latest additions you can follow us on Twitter or Instagram.

Note: Bing Streetside may not be available depending of your country. To enable it you can switch your Bing Maps to a country that supports Streetside such as Canada or France. The settings are located in the top right corner: