While the VHS tape might be as dead as the dodo now - with the last remaining VHS VCR producer ceasing production of the recorders this week - the local tele technician says he'll be still winding up videotape conversions for a while as locals switch over to new formats.

The 40-year-long analogue magnetic videotape era might be at an end but Mr Szyc believes there's still thousands of tapes sitting hidden, forgotten, or just waiting for a new life via a DVD or Blu-ray format. His business, Peel TV Services, has been operating for all of those years, since 1975 and in the same spot in north Tamworth, and John remembers the arrival of the Beta and VHS systems to our movie world.

Beta might have been the more superior format but VHS rapidly overtook it in popularity and has only just managed to outlast the rival tapes by about nine months. While it might have seen the last machine off the production line, market analysts reckon there are thousands of machines still hiding in the tv cabinet, particularly in baby boomer homes. Video rental chains boomed in the 1970s and 1980s.

"I opened the first video rental shop in Tamworth back in those days and at its peak there were around 12 video movie rental shops in the Tamworth area," he said this week.

It was a craze that was widely credited with killing off the drive-in movie theatre and whacking the local movie theatre about the ears for a long time. Two generations of locals bought out their video recorders, taped miles of family life and happenings, and trekked in huge numbers to the local shop to buy the latest blockbusters. Mr Szyc says he knows customers and friends who have between 200 and 300 tapes in the family cupboard. Over the past couple of years, and increasingly lately, many of them have been making a bee line for places like John's to convert them to contemporary formats easily played on a DVD player.