A Series of Tubes

In 2007, under the alias xdog, Jay whipped up A Series of Tubes — an Apple TV app that put YouTube on the original Apple TV before Apple had an official SDK for writing apps on the thing.

He built it using the AwkwardTV reverse-engineering tools the hacker community had put together for BackRow. He filmed a casual living-room demo of it himself (that’s his voice in the YouTube clip). The thing hit Digg, then the Mac tech sites of the day, and a San Jose Mercury News reporter came looking for who xdog really was — somehow landing Jay’s name in print alongside Steve Jobs and Google’s CEO of the time. Brief, very specific fifteen minutes of Internet fame.

Watch the living-room demo on YouTube

A curiosity from the Heynow archives — not a product we ship today, just a fun footnote from the early Apple TV hacker era.

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