Why do remote controls still ask you for the number of a TV channel?

It would seem that remote controls as interfaces are falling behind in usability with the deluge of 1000s of cable channels, VOD and DVR options….

I want:
- a small wireless keyboard or touchscreen
- and/or speech recognition
- semantic search by actors, genre, recently viewed

What I really don’t want is to have to remember whether the channel I am looking for is 653 or 249 on my cable box!… imagine looking for websites using the IP address instead of the URL and you will get the insanity of the current approach.

Hopefully Tivo is thinking about this…