If you have been thinking of transferring your old VHS home movie tapes to DVDYou will find that it is not easy to find a local service near your home to convert VHS or VCR tapes. Everyone you know has VHS tapes and eventually everyone will want to transfer them to DVD, so why is it so difficult 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 hot business idea that 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 longer demand. Why launch into a business with a declining demand?

2. The ribbon transfer equipment is not easy to find. Doing a Google search for 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, Not Available, or No Longer Available. How are you going to run a video transfer business if you can’t easily buy the equipment to get the job done?

3. Like all brick-and-mortar stores today, you must compete with online retailers.. While it is difficult to find a local VHS to DVD transfer lab locally, 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 send the work to India, Mexico, Pakistan … It is difficult for a local video lab to pay American salaries to American technicians to compete with online retailers. That is another reason why it is difficult to find a VHS video transfer lab near your home.

Unfortunately, many people are very uncomfortable shipping their home movie tapes. Stories of online retailers closing down before tapes are returned to you, or tapes being lost or damaged on the way, make it very difficult for people to have the peace of mind of shipping their precious and irreplaceable home movie tapes.

So what is a person to do? Magnetic media, be it VHS tapes, Hi8 tapes, 8mm tapes or miniDV tapes have a shelf life, and the best time to transfer them to digital formats is: Yesterday. It is not wise to wait too long. There is no shortcut. You need to do your homework to find that local video transfer lab at the location that will not ship your tapes and is a short drive from your home. Search the web on Google, ask your friends: everyone has videotapes in their closet, right? Go to Craigslist, ask your local libraries where they go to transfer your legacy media. One word of caution: make sure they are not amateurs, but a bona fide video transfer lab. Video equipment that is not used and maintained regularly breaks down and can damage your precious tapes.