Do you, or your parents, have a stash of family videos that are still on VHS? Perhaps your grandparents do?
A crappy thing about VHS tapes is that they degrade over time, really anything over 10 years. Not a lot of people have been using VHS in the past ten years. Most likely, those tapes you might have are a lot older than that, which means they’re probably getting worse for wear.
If you have tapes of things that you would like to keep, it’s actually quite simple to turn them into digital files. From there, you can store them in the cloud, on your hard drive, and even burn them to DVD if you would like.
This post contains affiliate links.
How to Digitize VHS Tapes
You’re not going to believe how easy, and how cheap, it is to digitize VHS tapes. All you need to do is buy one of these doodads, and make sure you have a VHS player and a computer. That’s it.
The top one, the Elgato Video Capture (10020840)
The best part? This puppy only costs a hundred dollars! Of note, many reviewers say that this product is best used with a Mac.
Elgato Video Capture (10020840)
If you want a slightly more upmarket model, there are also these two:
Blackmagic Design Intensity Shuttle (BINTSSHU)
Hauppauge 1212 HD-PVR High Definition Personal Video Recorder
How To Make Money Digitizing VHS Tapes
So you go buy this thing for $100. Then what?
It’s an amazing side hustle opportunity, that can be completely done on the side, with very low overhead. So low, this should qualify to be in the book The $100 Startup!
First, get an Elgato Video Capture and test out the process on your own VHS tapes, to ensure that you have learned the software and the process.
Next, set up a quick website. (If you really want, you can skip this step.)
Figure out how much you want to charge.
Let’s assume you have the following start up costs:
$100 – Elgato Video Capture
$30 – Basic Website Setup
$10 – Blank DVDs
$10 – DVD Jewel Cases
$12 – DVD Labels
$40 – Two months of premium Dropbox membership
$5 – Fiverr Gig to get an outro with your branding
$198 – Total
If it takes 10 minutes of hands-on time in order to fully digitize a file, on average, including pick up/drop off time, and you charge $5 per video, you need to digitize 40 VHS tapes before you break even. After you have covered you main overhead, you will earn around $30 per hour for making these tapes. The tricky part is that you can’t do it all at once, you need to set the videos up to run.
Validate!
Now that you’ve got your price, get out there and validate your idea. Post on Craiglist and in local Facebook groups. Ask people to send you a message if they are interested in having any of their old VHS tapes digitized and saved to their hard drive or a DVD. (Charge a dollar more for a DVD, it’s more work and has overhead!). Also consider offering bulk discounts, because the time you spend handing off the tapes is the same if there are twelve or two.
If you can get enough business for forty tapes, put your Amazon Prime account to work and buy the stuff you need! After the first forty tapes, you have paid for all of your gear (you’ll need to keep paying for your cloud hosting, if you use it), and almost everything else will be profit. Not too shabby!
Brand!
You want to make it really easy for more people to find your business, so add a short clip to the end of every video that you make, telling people which city you operate in and giving them a way to contact you. Do the same on any DVDs and cases that you make. You can get a short clip made very easily on Fiverr, if you’re not sure how to do it yourself.
Selling Points!
You want people to preserve their memories, give their parents or grandparents their memories in a form they can use (and takes up less space, if they are downsizing!), remember junior’s first home run, etc. Don’t forget to suggest they make great gifts (they do!).
Advertise your services at senior’s homes, senior’s centres, as a family gift idea, on Craigslist, on Facebook and anywhere else that you can think of!
And there my friends, you have it. This is how to digitize VHS tapes and as a bonus, how to turn it into an easy little side hustle.
Do you have old VHS tapes hanging around your house?
I didn’t know that you could convert VHS into DVD’s! My grandmother has so many VHS tapes that would be a lot of fun to convert and be able to watch again. This way, when the player breaks we can still keep the movies. It would be nice not to have to just throw them out when we have no way to watch them anymore.
This sounds so much easier than I would have thought it would be. I should definitely convert my VHS videos into DVD’s myself! Recording the TV while it plays sounds like the easiest idea here.
Cool idea, but I’d be VERY VERY nervous doing this with people’s memories. My Dad recently started converting all the old VHS tapes over to digital copies. He used 3 VCRs and they all ate a few tapes because the heads were either misaligned or needed to be cleaned. We are all now digitized, and it was very easy for him to do, but there’s generally one copy only, and I just would feel absolutely terrible if I lost the last video of their grandma or something. Just my two cents 🙂
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Ooooh, good point. I hadn’t thought of that at all!
There is a company near my house that specializes in converting things to digital. I never looked into their rates, though because I don’t have any VHS tapes. They seem to be doing pretty well, though, and have a MUCH higher overhead than what you are proposing in this post (their building is an old bank building).
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Oh neat! There is a pretty big market for converting old media types, I bet they have some pretty stellar equipment and can handle a variety of formats quite well.
This is so clever! I think this would go over well in the community I live in. I see stacks of VHS tapes in lots of homes I visit.
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I know that VHS tapes are still a popular way to keep kids entertained (hello thrift store!), but most of the ones that I see around these days are family videos that haven’t been converted. Let me know if you try it out as a side gig!
Oh man, this is totally awesome! About 10 years ago (seriously) I bought a VHS to DVD converter for my mom, but it had to be connected to a TV (no computer involved) and you basically had to watch it as it was going to mark chapters. Needless to say, we did not sit and convert all of our old VHSs and I never really thought about it again. I’m definitely going to look into this! Thanks!!
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Oh interesting! I would just put it all as one, but combine multiple things, like dance performances, onto a single DVD.
I recently “watched” the last VHS tape I got and was super disappointed at how terrible the quality is now on a modern TV. I will be curious to find out how the quality will scale when the tapes are digitized and if there will be a screen size limitation where the quality is extremely poor making the digital copy unwatchable…but I might be wrong.
Other than that, this is a really good idea, especially the way you pitched it aimed at older people.
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It’s entirely possible that they won’t do well on gigantic screens… do you remember having to press the tracking button to get the image quality to be tolerable? I sure do. That said, we had a big screen TV that was projection style, before they went to a widescreen format, and the videos appeared as well on that as on everything else.
Yes! Finally someone taught how to digitize vhs. I have so many tapes here that I am afraid some of those are not playable anymore. I just hope I can save more vhs. Thanks Anne.
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Let me know if it works well for you.
Cool idea for the seniors. I think it makes a good present for your grandparents.
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Definitely a good one for them. In my experience, they watch the videos the most.