57 Channels (and Nothin’ On)

I was watching the Broncos play the Raiders on Sunday afternoon (go Tebow!) when a DirecTV commercial caught my attention.

I wasn’t paying much attention until a voice at the end of the ad trumpeted that anyone who signed up now would receive (among other things) 47 premium movie channels for free.

Now, my wife and I have a basic cable package, and we don’t pay for any premium movie channels. Even so, we’ve got something like 150 or 200 channels available. Frankly, I don’t even know how many we get, but it’s quite a few. And we watch about, oh, maybe six.

Listening to the commercial announcer, I had a couple of thoughts. The first was, 47 premium movie channels!? Who needs that many movie channels?

My next thought was this: It wasn’t that long ago, really, that there were just three such channels: HBO, Showtime and Cinemax. OK, OK, it’s been a couple of decades since then, but I can remember when HBO alone was something of a novelty.

These days, though, three channels of premium content hardly cut it. No, today’s savvy, tech-happy consumers demand choices—and, it would seem, the more the better. Less isn’t more. More is more. In a world in which 24/7 connectivity is increasingly the norm thanks to the Internet, downloadable content and all manner of mobile devices, the good ol’ TV, it seems, has more competition than ever.

So we get commercials from DirecTV practically begging people to sign up for more channels than they can possibly watch (even with one of those snazzy new top-of-the-line TiVo DVRs that can record four channels at once).

Frankly, I can’t help but wonder if perhaps more isn’t more after all, but less. Kind of like what Bruce Springsteen satirically observed in his 1992 song, “57 Channels (and Nothin’ On)”: “Man came by to hook up my cable TV/We settled in for the night my baby and me/We switched ’round and ’round ’til half-past dawn/There was fifty-seven channels and nothin’ on.”