Before Netflix, before Roku, before streaming existed — some of us were building our own. This page started as documentation for my DIY PVR setups in the mid-2000s. Rather than delete it, I’ve reframed it as what it actually was: an early signal of the same shift that would eventually upend the entire television industry.

The Problem We Were Solving

In the early 2000s, if you wanted to watch TV on your schedule, your options were a VCR or an expensive TiVo. The open-source community had a different idea: build your own. MythTV on Linux gave you a full DVR with a program guide, automated recording, and commercial skipping — years before any mainstream service offered the same.

I built my first PVR almost twenty years ago using an old TV tuner, some early Linux drivers, and a cron job. It was held together with patience and forum posts. But it worked. I could record shows, skip commercials, and watch on my schedule. That was genuinely revolutionary at the time.

What the DIY PVR Actually Predicted

Looking back, the problems we were solving in our basements were exactly the problems the streaming industry would build billion-dollar companies around:

  • Time-shifting — watching what you want, when you want. Netflix’s entire model.
  • Ad skipping — MythTV had commercial detection in 2004. The ad-free streaming tier arrived a decade later.
  • Media aggregation — pulling content from multiple sources into one interface. That’s exactly what Plex, Apple TV, and every smart TV platform does today.
  • Home media servers — centralized storage accessible from any screen. We were running these on repurposed PCs before the cloud made it trivial.

The jailbroken Apple TV I ran with XBMC (now Kodi) was essentially a prototype for every streaming box that followed. The interface was rough, the setup was painful, but the user behaviour — browsing a library of content on your TV, launching what you wanted — was identical to what billions of people do today without thinking about it.

Why Early Adopters Matter

I’ve always believed that the people willing to tolerate broken, early-stage technology aren’t just hobbyists — they’re running a preview of where the market is headed. The friction they accept today is the opportunity someone will commercialize tomorrow.

That instinct has carried through my entire career. At Autotrader, I watched print classifieds become digital listings. At Refresh Partners, I built Facebook applications before the platform had a real API. At YMCA Canada, I led an early enterprise AI pilot when most organizations were still debating whether to allow ChatGPT. The pattern is always the same: the early adopters see the future first, and the ones who pay attention to what those early adopters are doing have a strategic advantage.

The PVR chapter of my life is long closed — streaming won, and it should have. But the lesson it taught me about technology adoption curves has informed every major decision I’ve made since.

Originally published circa 2006. Rewritten March 2026.