Now you make me feel old. In "the olden days" before streaming of media over the internet was as commonplace as it was now, that was the standard way that tech-savy people consumed media: Either on their PC or with some set-top box with built-in storage. I fondly remember my PopcornHour, which was basically a line of desktop-boxes that ranged from "basically a hard disk, video decoder and HDMI out" all the way to "can automatically rip your BlueRays".