If you’ve been thinking about transferring your old VHS home movie tapes to DVD, you will realize that it is not easy to find a local service near your house to convert VHS or VCR tapes. Everyone you know has VHS tapes and will eventually want to transfer them to DVD, so why is it so hard to find a local store that offers the service? Here are some reasons why:
1. Starting a VHS to DVD transfer business is not a good business idea It attracts entrepreneurs. In fact, the perception is that there will be fewer and fewer old home movie tapes to transfer, so this market will shrink very quickly until there is no more demand. Why jump into a business with dwindling demand?
2. Tape transfer equipment is not easy to find. Do a Google search on VHS to DVD transfer equipment? Now click on the product links and many of them point to pages that have these words at the bottom of the product photo: Out of Stock, Out of Stock, or No Longer Available. How are you going to run a video streaming business if you can’t easily buy the equipment to do the job?
3. Like all brick-and-mortar stores these days, you have to compete with online retailers. While it’s hard to find a local VHS to DVD transfer lab, there are several online video transfer labs vying for your business. They charge as little as $15 for a short VHS tape, or less than a dollar for photo scanning because many of them ship the work to India, Mexico, Pakistan… It’s hard for a local video lab to pay American wages to American technicians to compete with online retailers. That’s another reason it’s hard to find a local VHS video transfer lab near your home.
Unfortunately, many people feel very uncomfortable sending their home movie tapes. Stories of online retailers going out of business before returning tapes to you, or tapes being lost or damaged along the way, make it very difficult for people to have peace of mind shipping their precious and irreplaceable home movie tapes.
So what is a person to do? Magnetic media, whether it’s VHS tape, Hi8 tape, 8mm tape, or miniDV tape, has a lifespan and the best time to transfer it to digital formats is: Yesterday. Waiting too long is wrong. There is no shortcut. You should do your homework to find that local video transfer lab in the place that doesn’t ship your tapes and is within a short drive from your home. Google the web, ask your friends: they all have videotapes in their closet, right? Go on Craigslist, ask your local libraries where they go to transfer your legacy media. A word of warning: make sure they are not hobbyists, but a bona fide video transfer lab. Video equipment that is not used and maintained on a regular basis deteriorates and can damage your precious tapes.
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