This programmer turned saving people's old home videos into a business
CBC
Marshmallow Christmas cards gone wrong and family vacations past — these are the memories that live on Joel Kennedy's old VHS home videos, and now, thanks to his media conversion business, on his laptop.
"I'm from a family of five kids and we had 30 or so tapes that we had for a long time," Kennedy said. "We watched them so often that we started to wear out the camera and the tapes."
That's what motivated the London, Ont., programmer to start a business digitizing VHS tapes, audio cassettes, square film slides and even Super 8 film reels, an old film format used in movie-making.
In other words, he's in the business of saving people's memories.
When his family decided to make the jump from tape to digital for their own collection, Kennedy found a hole in the market — there weren't many businesses converting old tapes, but there certainly seemed to be a need.
"I thought, well, how hard can this be," he told CBC News. "Then I thought this might actually be something that's beneficial to other people as well."
Part of the conversion process is actually playing the media, for example on a camcorder or a VCR player. To help people make the switch from analog to digital, he's had to collect all kinds of gadgets and gear that can actually process the tapes.
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