I do this for a living and if you request it we can respect your wishes and turn off the live feed TV while recording.
To ease your worry I can add that we’ve done so many that it’s just background noise to us, we only pay attention to when something weird happens like flickering or other damaged tape type stuff. We only really look at it in the first few seconds when we start the recording to make sure everything is running smoothly. During processing we watch at very high speed playback just to ensure there’s no long dead gaps or someone accidentally filmed a 1 hour close up of the floor. Stranger’s special moments are extremely dull to us and we don’t care. :)

They usually just look at what kind of locks and security you have around your house, in case they want to murder your whole family later in an attempt to transform into a William Blake painting.

When they see your video is from many years ago, they’ll figure the intel is outdated and not watch any more.

If you don’t want anyone else to watch it enough to ask about it, consider digitizing it yourself. Depending on the format it might not be that difficult, or a fun project.

We play the tape to record it but just check to see when it ended. You can’t just sit there all day doing nothing.

They probably skim through it to see if there’s any boobs and ignore the rest.

we did photo printing. people asked me to print the craziest shit but I’d forget about them the next day. so my advice would be to go to a very busy place

You might check around with your friends and relatives, to see if any of them digitize stuff; I’ve done it on a casual basis for some of my friends and relatives.

Alternatively, you can probably get an old VHS machine at Goodwill, give it a quick cleaning, and pick up various digitizers (standalone recorder or computer-input) and convert your own tapes. If you do it yourself, I would strongly suggest checking your setup with old commercial tapes first, so that you iron out any setup issues on something you don’t care about, before sending your irreplaceable tapes through whatever process you have.

[Note on commercial tapes: some of them have copyright protection on them, which will make the video fine when you send it to a tv, but just make it erratic when you send the video through another device. Very very occasionally, for undetermined reasons, an entirely home-recorded tape will also exhibit this behavior. If this happens to you, there are two main options: (1) if the device you’re recording onto has front input jacks, switch your setup to record through those jacks, as many of the front inputs lack the monitoring needed to screw up your recordings. (2) Check eBay or other online shopping places for a “video stabilizer”, which is old-timey code for “copyright buster”. Look at the listing for some indication that it’s used for VHS or VCR.]

If you think there might be issues with the tape quality (for example, dropouts or the magnetized bits sticking to the back of the previous strip on the reel), you might want to go professional - but only after seeing what steps they take to minimize this, and what that might cost.

Edit: when I did this for family and friends, I’d monitor the first five minutes or so of each recording, simply to make sure that the tape wasn’t crinkling (more likely to happen at the start of a tape, or some midpoint that was heavily used (repeatedly rewatching a single scene) of where someone had left the tape sitting. And then I’d check in periodically, to see if the tracking needed to be adjusted. I’d also try to at least stay in the same room, so that I could react quickly if I heard the tape crinkling.

Also, in an attempt to minimize problems with the tape having become slack over the years (even if properly stored on their spines), before I started any new tape, I would: if it was stopped partway or at the end of the reel, I would rewind the tape to the start, fastforward it to the end, then rewind it again, to try to reset the tension on the tape. If the tape was stopped at the start of the reel, I’d fastforward and then rewind, to reset the tension.

Also, if you do this yourself, it’s good to have some old tapes lying about that you don’t care about, either old commercial tapes or home-recorded tapes with content you don’t care about. This is because every so often, a tape will jam inside it’s cassette, at which point you need to open it up and unjam it. But sometimes the cassette itself (but not the tape) has developed problems, and you need to re-shell the tape into the shell of a different cassette.

Well now I want to see a video of a nine year-old excitedly freaking out over a life-sized Wesley Snipes cardboard cutout!

But in answer to your question, they probably do watch to a limited degree. But I’m sure they see so much random stuff while digitizing that they don’t pay that much attention. And worst case scenario, they’d probably think your video is a bit weird, but in an adorable way.

It’s ok. You can say it. You’re 60+ years old, and you have some VHS home recordings you made in the 80s with a bunch of women you lured back to your basement dungeon, and then fed them m&ms until they agreed to have sex with you.

And now you have like 400 VHS tapes that are a hassle to watch.

But also, you don’t want the guy at CVS to know you have a tattoo of big bird on your left butt cheek.

Depends on the service. There’s a lot of really bad ones that just seem to dump the video to a file and call it a day. Any good service will be monitoring the tape, but not sitting there watching the whole thing.

This is one of the sweetest, goofiest posts I’ve read in a long time. Blessings to you, op.