TV keeps throwing channels at us _ is there a saturation point?(Knight Ridder Newspapers)

It's around 100 channels that dry mouth sets in.

A lot of us grew up with maybe three TV stations to watch _ 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, even if that sometimes means seeing Jim Rome across a dozen channels at once.

The TV die-hard will watch Spanish-language channels even if he doesn't habla a word. He will soak ...