YesVideo is best known for converting old videotapes and photos and giving users back a DVD with all their old home movies in a digital format. But it’s increasingly moving past digitization and into online storage. With that in mind, the company is now giving all customers an unlimited amount of cloud storage for content that they convert using YesVideo’s service.
YesVideo has been around for more than a decade, offering people a way to easily convert all their home videos and photos for the digital age. They simply drop off films recorded in any old format — whether that be 8mm, VHS, or Beta — at any one of a number of 34,000 partner retail locations, like CVS and Bartell Drugs, as well as Target, Kodak, and Ritz Camera. The company then digitizes that content for them in one of two production facilities in the U.S., typically in less than three weeks.
It used to be that once YesVideo converted all those images or videos, they’d send back a CD or DVD with all that content. Then they added the ability to store content online for a nominal fee, letting users access and share their videos and photos with a link to a webpage. Now it’s taking out that fee and giving out an unlimited amount of online storage free for users of the digitization service.
After a piece of content has been digitized, it’ll be available through a personalized share link, and can be accessed on the web, through social networks like Facebook, and soon even on mobile apps.
Users convert an average of 3 hours of video using the service, paying about $20 per videotape for the conversion process. But what’s really interesting is the amount of usage it’s seeing on the consumption side. Apparently people love watching and re-living those old home movies, as it sees viewership of 44 minutes per session on average.
While YesVideo has been operating since 1999, it’s taking big steps to move from storing media on physical media like DVDs, to making them available in the cloud. To help with that, Greystripe founders Michael Chang and Andy Choi recently took over key leadership positions in the company, and invested $5 million into it.