They have, it’s just difficult to have it catch on. Bitcoin being the prime example… but the compute is basically burned for no useful purpose beyond security of the network itself. Because that is the main concern - security of the blockchain. Many have tried to use that same shape and instead have the compute be directed at something useful, with varying levels of success but nothing at that scale. There are however very successful long running projects like folding@home or the Mersenne prime search which have lots of people running a program locally that directs idle compute power on volunteers PCs to work on scientific pursuits.
There’s lots of cool examples of interesting things people have tried, (training models, etc) but it’s not easy to get traction.
Something like vast.ai is much easier to make fly because people who offer their resources for rent get directly paid by time used.
In short, it’s a cool idea that lots of people want but it’s hard to make fly.
Edit: also I guess we could consider malware / botnets successful implementations as well - for nefarious purposes.
100 tapes is quite a mountain to climb. I would consider finding a discount code for a service like southtree (or similar) and sending at least some of them to be processed that way. I did most of mine manually but had to throw in the towel for some tapes and send them in and I found that they often had like 50% off promotions and discounts for higher scales.
If you are down for the challenge / 100 hours of capture, go for it but just wanted to throw that out there because I hate to see media be lost to the sands of time.
That’s the biggest issue with trying to deal with dv tapes - the hardware is simply not very robust. Most cameras will either start ejecting tapes, eating them, or get filthy and start reading poorly with dropouts or damage the next tapes… it’s the kind of task that just keeps having new roadblocks and gets harder with scale (unless you are able to repair the decks yourself or willing to just keep buying them - but they’re eventually going to become scarce as well). The software side is relatively simple but can also be complicated by dropouts / overzealous scene detection in some software for capturing - so sometimes you have to just let it happen and run a script to stitch all the files back together into one to maintain sanity.
Sorry I am now ranting, because I had a huge box of them to deal with containing a lot of memories and projects that were valuable to me personally, and I procrastinated for years but finally got it done. Glad I did and those tapes are long gone.
VHS / analog tapes have similar issues but the solutions are easier to acquire (millions of cheap vcr’s everywhere), and you can tap directly into the signal so it’s actually a rich and interesting community and challenge to improve it. MiniDV is just pain for those of us whose prime years shooting footage happened to be during its reign.
The articles covering this topic have shown deals where various forms of media were purchased at surprising rates.
I’m not looking to start a company around this, my source of media and data are essentially a byproduct of my actual business. Ideally I’d like to find a broker or marketplace that I can feed it to.
I had a Gateway Destination 36” monitor that I somehow acquired at a garage sale in my room as a teenager. Getting it into my upstairs room required my friends and I to all risk our lives but it was well worth it.
I have an account and half the time when I follow a link from HN to Twitter / X it just throws an error that something went wrong / can't load the tweet. And video content works even less often than that. The site seems like it barely works at this point and is rapidly becoming a ghost town. What a waste.
It definitely would. And probably some that are not damaged when something gets jammed or the environmental conditions change and react with the paper. But if you’ve got a mountain of books to scan and you can do the bulk of them with a machine like this and then use a more careful approach for the special cases, that’s a win.
Probably true for many. But there can also be the other side of things where you just need to fly a lot and you want to keep those costs from adding up over time. For instance, needing to fly back and forth from home where you work to visit an ill relative. There are probably many situations where there is reasonable value to be had from a strategy like this.
Plus, you get the benefit of looking like an extremely cool dude!
There’s lots of cool examples of interesting things people have tried, (training models, etc) but it’s not easy to get traction.
Something like vast.ai is much easier to make fly because people who offer their resources for rent get directly paid by time used.
In short, it’s a cool idea that lots of people want but it’s hard to make fly.
Edit: also I guess we could consider malware / botnets successful implementations as well - for nefarious purposes.