DVR boxes were once the most advanced way of watching TV, but they’re being made obsolete by streaming.

Back in the days when the dot-com frenzy was nearing its peak and I was covering high-tech full-time for this newspaper, scarcely a week passed without someone showing up in our newsroom offering a demonstration of a new consumer gizmo.

Almost always these machines and the services they supported provoked yawns. As the Book of Ecclesiastes tells us, there was nothing new under the sun. Until the day a team from a company called ReplayTV wheeled in a television set wired to a box with a digital hard drive inside. They hooked up this digital video recorder to a cable jack and showed how we could use it to record, pause, rewind and fast-forward live TV.

As I’ve often related since then,

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