Currently, openlayers supports bing maps, however this is not an ideal option for a commercial application. What would be ideal is to have the ability to host and serve ariel imagery like NASA blue marble at http://visibleearth.nasa.gov/view_cat.php?categoryID=1484
Is there a way to serve an open source aerial image as a basemap in an openlayers 3 or 4 application? How could this be accomplished in theory?
EDIT: I'd like to know more about hosting and serving the aerial map locally. There are examples of how to do this with OpenStreetMaps using Mod_tile, renderd, mapnik, osm2pgsql and a postgresql/postgis database on the switch to OSM website https://switch2osm.org/manually-building-a-tile-server-16-04-2-lts/
How would one go about replicating this process locally using just raster imagery like NASA blue marble at http://visibleearth.nasa.gov/view_cat.php?categoryID=1484 (Large file)