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© St. Petersburg Times, published February 28, 2002
It's around 100 channels that dry mouth sets in.
A lot of us grew up with maybe three TV stations -- and some of them with fuzzy pictures. So the rise of nonbroadcast channels via cable and satellite dish has more than once set us to salivating.
In the roughly 70-million homes with cable, or 18-million with satellite dishes, viewers can get dizzy just thinking about their potential choices.
Ooh, look at all those sports channels! How many different movies are on right now? Is it true that I can get a station of Polish programming in Polish?
Yes, it's true. In fact, satellite service the Dish Network's foreign-language packages include channels in Polish, Spanish, Greek, Russian and Chinese.
Now, some viewers will watch anything, pay for anything. They'll take every regional Fox Sports Net telecast from around the country.
The TV die-hard will watch Spanish-language channels even if he doesn't habla a word. He will soak up educational channels even if his school days are long gone. He would rather use TV as a window to the world than look out a real window at his own yard.
But even as every month seems to bring more channels to watch, there comes a point where it's no longer a feast.
Maybe you think you have a handle on it all. But just when you do, more channels will be added -- or existing ones get changed, if not outright dumped.
Isn't there a point when it all becomes overwhelming? Where it's just not possible to remember which home-decorating channel had the show you liked? When, instead of picking one channel out of hundreds, you decide instead to turn the TV off?