09/03/2026
23 Years of Watching Formats Come and Go
Today marks 23 years since Duplication Media opened its doors in Urbandale. I didn't start the company on a whim — I'd already spent 8 years in the industry before opening in 2003, and that time was enough to see a need that wasn't being met. People had boxes of tapes and slides piling up with no good way to actually do something about them. When I started, I didn't treat it as a side project or something to run out of a spare room. I went in full-force from day one because I knew the need was real.
Video transfer has remained our number one service through all of it. I started with one DVD recorder and the ability to work with 12 videotape formats. Today, we can work with more than 20 formats and transfer more than 12 tapes simultaneously through a completely different workflow. That didn't happen with one big upgrade — it was built piece by piece over 23 years, as equipment, software, and our understanding of what could be done in parallel all continued to evolve.
But video was never the whole picture, whether it's Audio Transfers — reel-to-reel tapes, cassettes, 8-tracks...Slide Transfers—boxes of slides that haven't seen a projector in decades...Photo Scanning—whether it's high speed, flatbed, or even scrapbooks...Film Transfers—reels shot on 8mm,Super 8 and 16mm film...or even CD/DVD Duplications—1 or thousands of copies. Different customers come to us for different reasons, but often times someone brings in videotapes one year, then finds a box of film in the attic a few years later, then a stack of slides after that. Being able to handle all of it in-house, under one roof, means a lot to our customers.
The finished product changed just as dramatically as the equipment did. Twenty years ago, we transferred video and film to DVDs, audio to CDs, and photos and slides to data CDs. Today, more than 90% of our customers choose a flash drive full of digital files — it's easy to plug one into a smart TV, and many newer computers don't even have DVD drives anymore. Some of the same customers who had everything put on DVDs years ago are now coming back to have it all put onto flash drives.
Through all of that change, one thing has stayed constant: what actually keeps a 23-year-old business like this running isn't any particular piece of technology, it's the willingness to keep learning the next one. The formats keep changing. The equipment gets harder to find every year. The media gets older, and customers' procrastination makes the challenge a little more urgent with each passing year.
Although we're based in Urbandale, Iowa, people searching online have found us from more than 35 states and even internationally. What they've told us, again and again, is that they chose us because they could talk to a real person about something that can't be replaced.
And through every format change, the reason people bring us those memories hasn't moved an inch. It's the family Christmas from 1987. A child's first steps. A wedding. A birthday. A vacation. A grandparent's voice. The technology shifts beneath our feet, but the excitement of seeing a memory like that for the first time in decades is exactly what it was on day one.
I'm grateful to everyone who has trusted us with those memories over the past 23 years.
Here's to the next set of formats nobody's invented a name for yet.
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Jason Olson
Duplication Media opened its doors in September 2003. Based in Des Moines, Iowa we specialize in Video Transfers, Audio Transfers, Slide Transfers, Photo Scanning, Picture Videos, Film Transfers, CD Duplications, DVD Duplications, Videotape Duplications, Flash Drive Duplications, Online Video Servic...
