Scifi Channel Becomes Syfy Channel

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The popular specialty channel, SciFi Channel, owned by NBC Universal and home to such television programs of Eureka, Torchwood, and Battlestar Galactica has decided to rebrand its website and magazine from scifi.com to syfy.com.

Now (as Robert J. Sawyer points out on his blog) most science fiction authors don’t like the term ‘sci-fi’ to describe their works. For many writers of the genre ‘sci-fi’ brings with it a connotation of entertainment science fiction, basically Star Trek and Star Wars, what people’s perceptions of science fiction are rather than what it actually is meant to be. If anything, Sawyer notes, authors prefer the abbreviated SF.

Dave Howe, President for the channel, said that the Sci-fi name was limiting and followed it up with this statement in a recent article to the New York Times (read the full article here). “If you ask people their default perceptions of Sci Fi, they list space, aliens and the future,” he added. “That didn’t capture the full landscape of fantasy entertainment: the paranormal, the supernatural, action and adventure, superheroes.”

Honestly, I don’t really care for the change. I think the bigger question is who will receive the domain name for Scifi.com? Will it simply direct users to the new syfy.com? Personally I get new users added to Twitter every day just by virtue of having ‘Scifi’ in my username ‘ScifiWatch’. In my opinion I think the change will do more harm than good. For one thing it may detract some advertisers and viewers who have long been loyal to the Scifi brand. But putting that aside for a second, despite people’s perceptions of science fiction, when you see the Scifi Channel it’s a clear indicator of the genre. What do people conjure up when they hear Syfy? Some kind of sponge?