Sebastian states that the team making video clips leaves everywhere “shallow water”. By that he means they simply turn off the water masking when they’re cherry picking screenshots and clips. This exposes all of the default Bing imagery, but all of the glitches that go along with it, so they only pick the best spots for their promotional materials.
The scenery/art team is supposed to actually go back and create water masks for these areas, but many (most?) of the areas that have been featured in trailer videos for months and months remain covered up in “deep water” aka masked. They’ve unmasked some areas, but I don’t have my hopes up that they’re going to get to every location featured in these trailer videos… let alone the thousands of other spots needed to add value to regular flights beyond intentionally visiting a specific landmark location that has manually edited water masks, which is about the best you can do right now.
Frankly, I think it’s a waste of time for the scenery/art team to be working on water masking. There’s simply too many locations across the planet, and these manual efforts are drops in a bucket. This team should be doing airports and POI landmarks, and a programming team should be implementing a long term and global fix, which Joerg alluded to when he brought up adding bathymetry data.