The Business of Memory: Companies take Different
Approaches when Going Digital with Home Movies
 As Baby Boomers
grew, they sparked trends
ranging from blue jeans to
aerobics studios to minivans.
This year, the first wave of
America's 78 million Baby
Boomers is turning 60. And as
Boomers age, businesses are
gearing up to meet their needs.
One such industry consists of
companies helping to preserve
family memories. These stories
highlight companies that produce
personal histories, and ones
that transfer old home movies
and videos to DVDs.
Almost every household with children has one -- a shelf filled with
boxes of old home videos or even
more-ancient home movies. The
movies gather dust because no
one has reel-to-reel projectors
anymore. The videos get played
occasionally but are gradually
degrading with time.
The solution? Transfer those
family memories to digital
format for better preservation
and easier viewing.
Throughout the country,
thousands of businesses have
quietly carved out a niche
transferring home movies and
videos to DVD or other digital
formats.
Now several high-tech firms
-- including two Bay Area
companies -- are angling to
capture this huge but fragmented
market.
YesVideo of Santa Clara is
hardly a household name. But
it's the company behind the
video-to-DVD transfer services
at familiar retailers like
Walgreens, Rite-Aid, Kmart,
Target and Ritz Camera.
Meanwhile, a San Francisco
startup called Pictureal offers
automated editing of home movies
and videos as well as digital
transfer.
And HomeMovie.com, a
Washington company, is hoping to
make money as an online storage
site for video footage once it
has been digitized.
"Analog videotapes need to be
transferred to digital or they
face a great danger of being
lost," said Lars Krumme,
co-founder of HomeMovie.com.
"This is a market that a lot of
people are going after."
The market for home movie
conversion clearly is large. But
because it traditionally has
been made up of many mom-and-pop
companies, accurate sales
numbers are hard to find.
Greg Ayres, chief operating
officer of YesVideo, estimates
there are 700 million videotapes
sitting in shoe boxes in
people's closets. Krumme says
that the number could be as high
as 5.5 billion if you count
tapes of old TV shows as well as
home movies.
"The market is so heavily
fragmented that it's hard to get
a handle on what's being
converted," Ayres said.
Over the past few years, most
video to DVD transfer has been
done by local companies like
Digital Pickle of San Francisco,
which will convert a two-hour
video into DVD format for $25.
It digitize home movies as
well as still photos. Stephen
Valentino, a radio host who
lives in Marin County, turned to
Digital Pickle when thousands of
family photographs dating back
to the 1800s were damaged during
a home remodeling project. For
about $9,000, Digital Pickle
digitized his photos and
repaired much of the damage.
"When I sat my mother down in
front of the computer, she was
so moved she sat there and
cried," Valentino said. "How do
you put a price tag on memories?
As we say in Yiddish, this was a
mitzvah, a blessing, to have all
these memories and history
intact."
While some businesses like
Digital Pickle transfer raw
footage from film to
DVD,
others provide custom editing
services that can make those
interminable images of
baby's-every-wiggle more
viewable.
Elisabeth Roberts, a former
TV producer, runs a high-end San
Francisco business called Time
Capsule Films that charges
$1,000 to whittle down four
hours of home video into an
engaging 10-minute clip.
Roberts came up with the idea
for the business when, as a new
mother, she realized she had
shot three hours of video of her
baby's first four months, but
never looked at any of it.
"For every 20 minutes you
shoot, there's about 30 seconds
of good usable footage," Roberts
said. "I go through and look for
any little moment where
something happens like someone
giving the baby a kiss. My
background is telling a story. I
go through and look at all the
video, and get a feel for the
family and their story."
While businesses such as
Roberts' cater to a local
clientele, YesVideo,
HomeMovie.com and Pictureal are
striving to reach a national
market.
Each converts analog films
and videos to digital format.
They also each offer some
do-it-yourself video editing
capabilities once the footage
has been digitized.
Beyond that, their business
strategies vary widely.
-- HomeMovie.com, which
started in 1999, can digitize videotape for $5.
Customers can then edit
video online on the company's Web
site and order DVDs for less
than $20.
But the company is counting
on a new service called
StashSpace, which offers online
video storage and archiving of videos,
to provide the bulk of its
revenue. For instance, storing
five to 10 hours of video on the
site costs $3.99 per month.
"We are really looking for
customers to store and
share videos
with us and have it kept safe --
a remote digital desktop rather
than putting it in a safe
deposit box," Krumme said.
-- YesVideo, which also
started in 1999, began as a
similar online service. But it
changed to offer services to
brick-and-mortar retailers like
Walgreens, Target and Ritz
Camera. YesVideo figured that
people would be more willing to
entrust precious family videos
to a familiar retailer that is
already processing their still
photos.
Videos dropped off at these
stores are sent to YesVideo to
be converted into a DVD for
about $25. (Some Ritz outlets
have in-store kiosks that do
conversion.) Customers have the
option of editing their footage
through software that comes on
their DVD.
"Because of the whole trust
issue, we decided to leverage
the photo industry, since the
trust is already there,"
YesVideo's Ayres said.
-- Pictureal, the relative
newcomer of the three, is a Web
service that offers automated
editing. The firm claims its
technology can sift through
video footage, eliminate errors
and scenes with little action,
and provide a final product that
looks good without hours of
editing. Their higher prices --
$99 to convert three hours of
video into one DVD -- reflect
that service.
"We shine at taking a large
amount of video and editing it
into something manageable," said
Art Schram, a product manager
for Pictureal. "People can send
us their stuff and get something
nice out of it, without doing
much work, at a reasonable price
point."
These companies are all
angling for the attention of
consumers like 70-year-old
Bernadette Tapella of Sunnyvale.
She had a dozen 500-foot reels
of 8mm film family movies going back
as far as her wedding in 1959.
"We didn't take snapshots, we
took movies," she explained.
Tapella and her husband,
Charles, still own a movie
projector. But they hadn't used
it in 20 years because it is
such a hassle to set up. So last
year, she took a couple of the
reels into Walgreens for
digitization by YesVideo. It
wasn't cheap, about $60 per
reel, so she converted a few
reels at a time. This summer,
she bit the bullet and did the
last six for about $300.
Tapella has no regrets.
"Watching our wedding, you
think, 'Omigod, were we ever
that young?' " she said. "And
you see people who are gone now.
Even the ones who haven't died
looked so much younger.
Reminiscing was the best part,
and seeing people we hadn't seen
for years. At the time, you
think, 'I'm never going to
forget this,' but you do.
"If you have old home movies, do
it, because otherwise you'll
lose all that," she said. "I
think it's wonderful. I am
really happy we did it."
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