Tech transition business plan
I confess I still have a fair number of VHS tapes, about 2 linear feet of vinyl, and a film-based SLR. Replacing the device is easy. (And it’s good for the economy! All you new iPod Touch owners since Christmas — you go!) The chronic problem is of course conversion of those home movies on VHS to DVD, 35mm negatives to JPEGs, vinyl to MP3 (well, maybe the latter is a special case). I mean, what am I going to do with that cherry copy of Rubber Soul?
I glanced briefly at a $99 turntable at Brookstone that outputs to a flash drive, and I did a mental calculation of $99 divided by 2 linear feet. While this looks OK on paper, the thought of a conversion orgy for one weekend and then putting the gizmo up on craigslist just left me cold.
There are of course conversion services, as well, but there is the matter of paying beaucoup bucks to ship semi-priceless and now irreplaceable content through UPS, plus rather exhorbitant fees to pay for someone to push buttons and watch their machine shred through tape, with no real recourse for a do-over on a crappy conversion.
So I’m waiting for a company that gets it, a Geek Squad for the conversion age. They would retool every time a technology sunset would begin the big orange flare on the horizon, and they’d send techies out in smartly logoed Smart cars with an appropriate rental conversion box to your home, where the fee would include a temporary installation and a 20 minute tutorial, plus 20 minutes of phone support if needed. The rental on the conversion box would be for a day, a weekend, or a week, and they’d come back out at the end of that time to pick the unit up. You’d convert your VHS tapes to DVD, or film negatives to JPEG, or whatever — on your own time and to your own satisfaction. The cost for a week would be about half the cost of purchasing the conversion box, making it very attractive to customers and very profitable for the business plan. The same company could thrive forever, if it kept up with a new conversion service for every sunsetting technology. Ideally, they would eventually design their own sturdy and idiot-proof conversion boxes, like those rug shampooers you rent at grocery stores. Maybe using grocery stores or Best Buys as a pick-up rental center would be a good variation to the business plan.
Let me know when somebody figures this out.
Tags: 35mm, conversion, LinkedIn, VHS, vinyl
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