Either I am in early on an upcoming trend or just plain nuts but I am fascinated by the idea of having multiple TV channels going at once. Not with all the overlapping audio of course but as a background task, periodically glancing up from my main work-related monitor. In this mode, I can certainly handle more than one video feed at a time and this is especially true of TV news that runs throughout the day.

With the recent hurricane disaster in Louisiana, I found that watching one new channel was frustrating and that I craved more information. My satellite provider (and both of the majors do this now) is offering special "mix" channels that combine up to seven news-related channels in a single feed, arranging the simultaneous live broadcasts into a matrix on the screen. You only get sound from one of them but if there is a compelling image on any of the channels, it is just a click away.

Seven channels is probably just fine for some people, but I still want more. So while I used the picture-in-picture display on my monitor to watch one mix channel over the coax feed, I launched SlingPlayer on the PC desktop and navigated to another mix channel, this one being sports-focused. So now on a single monitor, with the help of my Slingbox, I am able to quickly scan 14 channels for programming that interests me.

How cool is that?