UK police dangle £75M to digitize its VHS tape archives

The UK police service is planning to launch a procurement to purchase tech and services worth up to £75 million ($102 million) in order to digitize its VHS archive.

According to a tender notice published last week, Bluelight Commercial - a not-for-profit buyer that acts on behalf of the emergency services - says the police force requires either in-house technology or outsourced services to convert the arcane magnetic tape format to digital storage.

The notice, which sets out procurement plans, says the framework agreement will help forces with the "conversion of analog media to digital records, including metadata for integration with a digital evidence management system."

VHS was invented in 1971 and first introduced in 1976. Its huge popularity as a physical format for licensed content and home movies began to wane in the 1990s after the introduction of DVDs.

In the first lot of the framework, Bluelight asks for in-house VHS media digitization software, hardware, and training to "enable a Police Force to convert VHS tapes to digital files." This chunk of the arrangement could be worth £50 million ($68 million) for four years, excluding VAT.

The second lot asks for outsourced VHS media digitization "for the provision of conversion services delivered completely by a third party with electronic files being returned securely to the customer force." The output is also set to be ingested by a digital evidence management solution. It could be worth up to £25 million ($34 million) over the same period.

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In addition, Bluelight Commercial is looking for a provider to help with more niche media digitization, including converting microfiche, CD, DVDs to an electronic file format, in an arrangement which could be worth a total of up to £25 million ($34 million).

BlueLight Commercial was established in 2020 by the Home Office to work collaboratively with emergency service members and is the national commercial body for policing. It is publicly funded and operates on a not-for-profit basis as a private company, limited by guarantee.

The UK public sector has often proved reluctant to give up its pre-computing era technologies. In 2020, the NHS launched a tendering process to replace ageing pager technologies in an effort to modernize hospital communications systems. ®