A decade ago, maybe a little more, futurists looked to the burgeoning cable industry and imagined "the 500 channel universe". Hasn't happened yet, although I just looked it up and found that we're nearly halfway there. There are 231 official cable networks, as of whenever the random article I looked up was written.
I remember back then being baffled by the concept. I couldn't imagine what programmers could fill 500 channels with. Even 231 channels would have seemed a ridiculous figure. I remember telling someone, after just having seen "Amazon Women on the Moon", which features a fake commercial for the fake store, "Spatula City" that "The Spatula Channel" would likely be channel 435. You'll Flip for the Spatula Channel™.
It shows why I wouldn't have made it in television. People with far more vision than I found more than enough programming ideas to fill the airspace. And that much programming was bound to, and did, give birth to all sorts of wonderful opportunities for social commentary. There's The Daily Show, The Colbert Report, Real Time with Bill Mahr, and one of my favorites, Robot Chicken.
Free speech people. Enjoy it while you got it.
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