The reason given was, and I quote, "we needed to cultivate a distinct point of view with a name that we could own that invites more people in and reflects our broader range of programming."
I don't know about this, SeePhee (seriously, that's how I'm going to pronounce it). First of all, I think you're alienating your core audience - geeks* - who probably will be very upset over this broad encouragement of a gross misspelling, annulling all those hours and hours they spent being insufferable grammar police. I mean, you might as well have just gone all the way and made your motto Imagine Gooder. Not only that, but one of the tenets of geekdom is that you really don't want to "invite more people in." For one thing, this will seriously devalue your overlording smarts and for another, inviting more people in usually means that your chances of getting beaten up have just skyrocketed. It's like you're hitting them right where they thought it was safe, SeePhee, like an only friend who has just sold out their secret treehouse hiding place to the town bullies.
Something else to keep in mind is that you're now alienating a large faction of the Polish community, since Syfy over there means "crap" and, more compellingly, is slang for everyone's favorite venereal disease: syphilis. Programming based around either of those two subjects could definitely be edgy and possibly broader. But then again, doesn't Discovery Channel deal with those in a scientific sense and VH-1 in a more literal sense?
I'm just gonna come out and say it. I think you had a good thing going with Sci Fi. This is like the equivalent of your punk rock phase, where you used Kool-Aid to dye a portion of your hair bright red and then spent all day sidling up to walls so your mom wouldn't see it. And didn't your lunch money get stolen anyway? Of course it did, since it was really just like putting a big magenta target on your head. Why not accept who you are and display it proudly? It's true what they say, you know. Chicks dig confidence. And, okay, just a hint of social skills doesn't hurt.
*I can say all these things because I self-identify.
Maybe they put aside so much money to implement the rebranding, that they didn't have much leftover to pay the creative team to actually come up with the new brand? I believe I read somewhere too that one of the reasons for the change was so they could trademark their name, cause apparently they tried to trademark "SciFi" and were rejected.
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