When I first saw it I was sure it was pre-April Fool's joke. Immediately I checked with a number of websites and pulled in Google for assistance. If this is a joke, it's a bloody good one.

For all the strides made in, what we'll call popular media, but what us normal geeks call Sci-Fi, there are many people uncomfortable about the term. It's like with comics. If you tell someone you read comics, even with the myriad of material out there, the vast majority of people think of comics, and the people who read them, as bifocal wearing, basement living, never kissed a girl guys who think more about dark matter physics and argue differences between matter stream and phase induction teleportation than hygiene.

The Sci-Fi Channel is changing their name to SyFy.

I though 'hum' when I read the article, however it seems the reason for the change is to make sure they have a brand on the name. Basically, they want to be able to have a station like NBC or MSNBC. See, Sci-Fi is out there in the consciousness, so by a lawyer standpoint you can't own it or brand it. Any fool with a website can get Sci-Fi something and the station can't do anything about it.

There was a slight little glitch in their marketing plan. Well, maybe not a glitch but a big windfall for one company. In this big wonderful move the Sci-Fi Channel (yes I'm going to call them this a little bit longer) in moving to SyFy didn't realize there was a website with the name SyFy which, ironically, was a Sci-Fi news and entertainment site. No bother, they bought the domain name.

See, it's like the TV people don't want Sci-Fi to be science fiction, so the SyFy moniker. Already the station has less Sci-Fi shows than you would think. It almost makes me yearn for the old days, when the channel was so starving for shows you could catch bad stuff like The Powers of Matthew Star or the Misfits of Science. Not great TV but it was in keeping with the station. Now you have the bad Saturday made for Sci-Fi movies, horror junk and, in a real shock, wrestling. Even on some rare occasions the channel has shown repeats of Law and Order!

I’m not sure how Law and Order fits into the Sci-Fi realm.

The station wants to be more, and who can blame them. Yes they got lots of recognition with Doctor Who and Battlestar Galactica, but Galactica is an expensive show to produce and for every hit like that, they get an even amount of minor hits like Stargate, which costs lots of money and they can get 3 or 4 clunkers which hurt the bottom line. By not being restricted to Sci-Fi they can bring in other retreads, like wrestling, which can bring money in on the cheap.

A great strategy for business but not for the science fiction geek.

It all comes down to exploitation. In the old days, channels like the WB tried to gain a foothold in ratings by appealing to the ‘urban market.’ Translation: they did lots of black shows like Living Single and Martin. They may not have been the greatest shows, but cornering the black market meant great ratings. When they felt they got what they needed, those black shows were dropped like hot potatoes in favor of the yawnfests like Gossip Girls and the 90210 retread. The only old school black shows left barely beat out Telemundo in the ratings.

So the new SyFy channel got their wish. They hit the prestige status on the backs of science fiction geeks, and now, just as the prom queen passed the test and can graduate, she is leaving the geeky tutor behind for the greener pastures of football stars and other jocks. We may want to shake our fists and vow that she will come back to us, this isn’t a Lifetime movie. In a few years the Syfy channel will have very little Sci-Fi and us geeks who helped the station along the way will be distant memories.