You’re probably just too young to remember. Come, stay a while and listen.

In the before times, you would have to check a paper booklet which could tell you the “days”, “times”, and “channels” a tv show or movie would “air”.

If you weren’t at home, or wanted to watch two things playing at the same time on different channels - you would miss out. This was a big deal at the time, because television was a social experience you would talk about with friends at school, or colleagues at work.

Before DVDs became commonplace, many homes had VCRs that were capable of recording these shows or movies onto cassette tapes that you could then watch at your convenience. But once DVDs became the home “standard”, VCRs were getting mothballed and homes needed a new device in order to record said shows.

Along came TiVo and other similar DVRs; capable of recording directly onto spinning discs of rust lovingly called “hard drives”. This would have been in the early 00s, before Netflix was ever a thing - and digital media distribution as we now know it today was limited to piracy, and required expensive broadband internet access.

As a bonus fun fact (unless I’m mistaken), that PSX hybrid was Sony’s first implementation of the much-loved cross-bar interface, later found on both the PSP and PS3.