Ask HN: Is there a market for my startup idea?

I have a startup idea and am curious if there is a market for it.

The Problem: Don't have access to family movie collection and DVDs are not as convenient as digital files.

My family has about ~100 movies on DVD from the old days. Many of these movies are not available in Netflix or Amazon Prime. In my case, the family's movie collection lives in a different country then the family. As I don't have access to the family movie collection, I'm sure others don't as well.

The Solution / Business: A service where you mail us your dvd collection and we return you .mp4 files.

Clients pay $0.50/dvd and postage to send us their movies. We extract the media content and package it in a .mp4 file for each DVD. We either send you a package of USB thumb drives with the videos (extra charge), or provide you with temporary download links. Clients can choose to have their DVDs returned or recycled.

So men and women of HN: Would you pay ~60USD to have digital copies of 100 DVDs from your movie collection? Do you even have a DVD movie collection?

Thanks for reading and hopefully you can provide some insight.

4 comments

[ 4.7 ms ] story [ 8.5 ms ] thread

rajacombinator 12y ago ↗

Have you done any market research? Pretty sure there are a variety of places already offering this.

I would only consider it for personal videos (eg weddings etc) because DVDs are too low fi to bother converting for anything that can be obtained in HD formats.

patricklorio 12y ago ↗

My only market research has been a few search queries in google. I didn't find anything similar to what I described.

That's a good point you bring up about the quality of DVD. I didn't consider it. So would that be the reason you wouldn't use a service like this?

ra00l 12y ago ↗

did you gave the thought to copywrite infringement? What actually stops you to share that dvd with your extended family and friends and colleagues and so on?

man_bear_pig 12y ago ↗

why start a company where every year the market size shrinks. unless you prove to me that churn is slower than the market realizes (e.g. netflix when it began) such that you can be the stepping stone and your larger vision is to be the formidable player in this new technology X that you'll develop in the background, this seems like a market (even if there is one) that a) investors will murder you on and b)not sure you want to be in the space.

enter a space where there is secular tailwind not headwind. don't look at next 12 months (you'll be busy just getting the product ready for market reception)... but next 5 years and how you'll bridge that gap. maybe i'm missing something here about your vision.