PBRTV was “born” on October 21, 1998 as “borrowed space” on Dave Hughes’ DC Radio and TV Website which he would later rename “DCRTV”. For a little over a year, PBRTV creator Eric O’Brien would feed news, station info and comments to DCRTV Dave via e-mail. It quickly became evident to Hughes that Pittsburgh radio nuts clamored for more than he was able to provide and encouraged O’Brien to do his own website. In early 2000, Eric O’Brien had learned just enough HTML Code from Hughes to be dangerous and began going crazy with his website. O’Brien started receiving information and tidbits from local radio and TV execs., observers, newspaper reporters and fans as the year progressed.
One such person was Jason Togyer who worked as the Radio and TV reporter for the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review at the time. Later in the summer, Togyer interviewed O’Brien for what ended up being his last radio and TV column for the paper. A friendship was formed and soon Togyer found himself writing columns for the site and he later encouraged O’Brien to make PBRTV into a “dot-com”. Ever the cheapskate, O’Brien was unsure of what he was getting into, but soon released a few shekels for web-hosting and his first internet domain – PBRTV.com.
As the early 2000s wore on, station listings for the Ohio Valley, Erie, Shenango Valley and Central Pennsylvania regions were added. In 2007, PBRTV joined the world of “blogging” which allowed it to adapt more of a professional appearance. In 2012, a fresh blog was started with all of the old blog postings ported over for archival purposes.
