Channel Surfing: One of the Great Problems?

In another Technology Review article, this one on Gadgets in the Super-Chip Age, David Freeman starts out with the following sentence:

In a lab at Philips Electronics in the Netherlands, researchers are stalking the solution to one of the great problems of modern life: having to hunt through hundreds of television channels for something you’d like to watch.

If I had to list the great problems of modern life, I don’t think that finding a television channel with something I’d like to watch would be very high on my list, and seriously hope that it wouldn’t be high on most other people’s lists. Instead, I would hope that problems such as poverty, hunger, war and disease would be uniformly higher than finding a channel with something good on.

Of course, I’m an outlier, watching less than an hour of television a week, on average. I realize that most people in the USA watch far more than this, and suspect that most people in the Netherlands watch more television than I do as well. Perhaps many people really do care more about finding something good on television than in creating a better world. In any case, I thought that TiVo had largely solved the former problem.