NBC Universal's Sci-Fi Channel is changing its name to the "SyFy channel," a name that is apparently easier for children to text to one another and will therefore increase the company's earnings dramatically.

"SyFy" sounds exactly like "Sci Fi" when you say it, but, as Richard noted in the Trade Roundup, NBC Universal will own it now. For years, NBC executives had longed to trademark the channel's own name, but legal kept telling them you can't trademark a genre of entertainment for lonely obsessives. So they spent years, and paid a branding company gobs of money, to come up with SyFy.

The fact that a Floridian named Michael Hinman discovered that you can creatively misspell Sci Fi more than 10 years ago, when he founded a web site that eventually became the SyFy Portal, which covered many of the Sci Fi Channel's shows, seems not to have bothered NBC Universal. A couple months ago, SyFy Portal abruptly changed its name to Airlock Alpha, which the site's founder says was done "indirectly because of" the Sci-Fi Channel's decision to steal and/or buy the name.

Accompanying the name will be the channel's new slogan, "Imagine Greater," which means nothing and is grammatically incoherent.

Nikki Finke says it's all Jeff Zucker's fault.