Preserving home movies for streaming

SCOTTSDALE, Ariz. — By Mark Rukavina's estimates, there are over 1 billion home movies from the analog era sitting in closets, waiting to be digitized.

In another era, he'd be trying to sell you on getting those old VHS tapes and 8mm movies transferred to digital by way of a DVD and his iMemories company.

But not anymore. For him, it's now all about the cloud, to see those flickering old images — along with new stuff — on apps and streaming TV.

"Everyone wants their memories in one place," says Rukavina, founder and CEO of iMemories. His energies are devoted to the company's cloud service, which marries your old movies with all the new photos and video clips being generated on smartphones and tablets.

"For most of us, nothing is organized," he says. "We're trying to solve that."

He's calling iMemories the "Netflix" of "family memories" and charging $5 monthly or $49.99 yearly for the online service, which started in January. Videos and photos can be accessed via computer, smartphone and tablets via an app. You can watch on TV via a set-top box like Apple TV as well. (Reader alert: if you stop subscribing, your memories live on for 6 months before getting deleted from the servers.)

Wednesday, he'll begin offering downloads, at no charge, of the full-resolution video files to customers who want them.

That's not something you can get from rival YesVideo. The company sends instructions for how to "rip" the video file off the DVD after you've purchased it.

With so many companies asking consumers to fork over money for annual subscriptions, is that a tough sell for Rukavina?

He says no. The fact that photos and videos are spread across Facebook, Apple's iCloud, storage site Dropbox and more, presents "a big opportunity." "They don't have all their family memories in one place in the cloud."

(He won't reveal subscriber numbers, saying the service is too new.)

The company is based here in a 25,000 square-foot warehouse, where 100 employees are busy copying old movies on 8mm and 16mm projectors, and VHS tapes are churning along on his 500 VCRs. Some 100,000 old tapes and movies get digitized every month from here.

Take a walk through the warehouse, and you see old birthday parties, sporting games, weddings and summer vacations getting cleaned up and copied, with employees stuffing the finished DVDs into cases, to be mailed out with the day's delivery.

Rukavina works directly with Best Buy, The UPS Store, Walgreen's and Kodak, taking archive orders for their customers. He says he has over 250,000 yearly customers.

YesVideo is based in Santa Clara, California, and counts Wal-Mart, Costco and CVS as retail partners.

iMemories charges $9.99 to have VHS tapes copied to digital. It's $10 extra if you want a copy on DVD.
That compares to $12.99 for YesVideo, plus $6.99 and shipping for a DVD.

Even with the modern shift to smartphone imagery, Rukavina figures there is another 50 years worth of digitizing to be done. With 1 billion old movies and "trillions" of old photos, "We have a lot of work yet to be done."

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