I’ll go ahead and jump on the bandwagon of those lambasting the SciFi network for changing its name. Their marketing droids think “SyFy” is catchier, as the people they interviewed said that was how they texted the name of the channel.Oh sure, change the entire brand based on how someone texts your name. That’s really fucking smart. Not to mention that it calls to mind syphilis (as a matter of fact, someone has already registered syfyl.us specifically for people to bitch about the name change).
I’m against the change for a number of reasons. SciFi stands for something, whereas SyFy means nothing. They’re also changing their tagline from the short and sweet “IF” to the grammatically horrid “Imagine Greater.” “IF” was perfect. Not only did it mirror the “FI” part of their name, but it’s the central theme of all science fiction. “Imagine Greater” is so broad it’s meaningless. And you’d think a network that wanted to be text-friendly would stick to a two-letter tag rather than increasing the length by 700%.
Not that I really expect anything different from them at this point. These are the same brilliant decision-makers that brought in Bonnie Hammer from Lifetime, who has publicly stated that she hates science-fiction.
This is also the same network that puts wrestling in a prime-time slot, finances execrable original movies instead of showing classics, and runs every B horror movie they can steal from their parent company (and not the good kind of B movies, either). And while other networks order up thirteen episodes of shows to fill out a season, SciFi shows them in runs of eight episodes, then breaks for six months.
The current president, Dave Howe, said of the backlash:
“Our core audience will use it an opportunity to question our motives, they always do."
I don’t know which South American B-school diploma mill you sent your SASE to, Dave, but if your core audience is always questioning your motives, maybe you’re…oh…I don’t know…alienating them.
Dumbass.
When cable started, the pitch was that it would be a "magazine rack" of special interest channels. The Learning Channel, The History Channel, The Golf Channel. As time goes on, though, the networks are becoming homogenized, offering the same crappy “reality” shows and low-rent makeover specials.
When was the last time you saw a music video on Music Television, something decidedly highbrow on Bravo, a movie more than twenty years old on Turner Classic Movies, or an orchestral performance on Arts & Entertainment? That’s one reason these channels are rebranding themselves, because if your name means nothing, you can show whatever you want.
It’s a damn shame. SF geeks are already proficient with using computers to find the content they want to watch; this is just giving them all the more reason to ignore the TV. SciFi could have filled an entire calendar year with all of the great (and not so great) science-fiction shows of yesteryear. Shows like The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits, Buck Rogers and Manimal, Lost in Space and Misfits of Science. How about the serials like Flash Gordon, or the movies like Them!? Is the MST3K back catalog really that expensive?
But they chose to show wrestling.
At 10:00 P.M.
On a channel for geeks.
Riiiiight.
I actually hope this is the first part of them killing the channel entirely, because it would be painful to watch it limping along after so promising a start. They’d have a hard time justifying to their advertisers why their supposed target audience is no longer there. Because remember, networks are paid by advertisers, not you. The channel sells your viewership to the advertisers.
You are not the customer.
You're the product.
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