Saturday, April 26, 2008

Business idea: Professionally pressing family archival CDs and DVDs

This is not a philosophy post, so feel free to skip. Last night, I was backing up 16gb of family photos and videos once again. I have most of it also backed up on CD-Rs and DVD-Rs, but now I'm copying it onto two more hard drives. Apparently, home-burnt CD-Rs and DVD+-Rs degenerate because they are ink-based. Nobody knows in just how long they degenerate, because it would require long-term study. Commercial CDs and DVDs have a metal layer that has physical pits in it, but there is no consumer device that makes them.

I wish someone made a business of transferring home video DVD+-Rs and home photo CD-Rs onto professionally pressed DVDs and CDs for archival purposes (and maybe keeping a copy on the business's backup server in case one's own give out). As more and more people have a lot of their family memories on digital media, I think there would be significant amounts of money to be made.

I googled to see if anybody does this sort of thing. Couldn't find anybody. Here is a niche—maybe the invisible hand will fill it? Currently, you can't get professionally pressed CDs in quantities less than, I think, about 250.

No comments: