Founder
Jeremy
Most of my family and friends would describe me as nostalgic, perhaps wistful even. I tend to find myself thinking about the past, which leads me to search through a shoebox or old cabinet for a long-lost video tape in the hopes of reliving the experience. And sometimes old videos can be the cause rather than the result of conjuring up long dormant memories.
During a visit with family, my mom showed my siblings and I a video of us learning how to make hot tamales from our grandmother years ago. I had never seen it. My mom had it transferred to DVD, which was the only way we were able to watch it since the VCR had long since been discarded. It was like looking through time resulting in a cascade of memories flowing into my mind. It was great and I wanted more.
I asked my mom if she could transfer more VHS tapes for us to watch. She said she could but had to be selective since the process was expensive. She explained that it cost over $30 just to get that one VHS tape transferred to digital at the local Walgreens. I wanted all of our home videos transferred but understood it wasn’t feasible due to the costs.
A few months later, my mind came back to the conversation with my mom. I just couldn’t accept that it should be so expensive to transfer VHS tapes to digital form. After doing some research on the digitization process, I realized that I could do it myself. I did have to invest in a number items—hardware, software, and most importantly a VCR. But with those components in hand along with the techniques I learned from my research, I was able to transfer tapes with quality results.
As I was working on digitizing and processing my family’s memories from dusty VHS tapes that had been sitting in old boxes for years, I wondered how many thousands or even millions of tapes sat around deteriorating in other homes. How many memories would be lost? How many meaningful moments would be thrown away because it was too expensive to transfer them to a format people could access? There had to be something that could be done to save these moments before they were lost to the trash bin.
After some thought, I came up with the idea to create a company that transfers VHS tapes and does so for free. The free part was important since just another paying service would force people to face the same competing options my mom did—save their memories or save their money. To make it free, I had to think differently.
I set up Autumn Rewind to make its money from the ad revenue generated from the views of the videos we post online as well as licensing fees. The person submitting their VHS gets the digital file as a download link and a percentage of the revenue for a period of time for the tapes they transferred to us. The only thing the customer pays is US postal service costs to ship it to us for transfer.
There are tapes that some may find too personal to share, and we understand that. With that in mind, we make it clear that customers should send in only what they are comfortable being shared. Sharing, after all, is the second aim of Autumn Rewind.
With every new video shared, we open the past to more people and thus, encourage more sharing. There may be moments that you don’t have video of but might be held by someone else. The idea is to have as much video from the past shared so you and others can find new content of treasured memories or even simply of places that no longer exist, an old home perhaps or maybe the long-shuttered mall that you and your friends enjoyed as kids. Whatever past event or place you seek, we hope we can help you unlock it from your old tapes as well as discover more from others.