You young'uns won't know this, but when the Fox Network first started up in the eighties, it used the name FBC, or Fox Broadcasting Corporation. Not many people remember this because it was before American Idol, X-Files, Married With Children or The Simpsons. (Yes, even I have difficulty believing there was a time before The Simpsons.) This was when their only show was Joan Rivers's short-lived late night talk show. It's easy to understand why: all the other networks went by initials, even the few cable channels used initials (HBO, ESPN).
Of course, now times have changed, cable channels mostly have names. Radio stations have increasingly ridiculous names that they use in place of their call-letters that they only mention when they legally have to. I feel sorry for the stations that went to the trouble of coming up with a clever call-letter name like CHUM or CHYM. The hundred bucks they paid to a PR firm in the seventies must seem like a waste now. If they had PR firms in the seventies.
But the reason I'm thinking about the good old days of meaningless initials in broadcasting is the onslaught of silly names given to on-demand TV services trying to compete with Netflix. We're getting ads for "Crave," which is Bell/CTV's entry in the market. Because who wouldn't want to download programming using something named after a cat food. But even worse is their competitor "shomi" (sounds like "show me," geddit?)
Once again, living in the future is great and all, I just wish everything didn't have such dumb names. The need for unique domain names on the Internet forced some odd names, but at least they were mostly just non-sequiturs (Amazon) or bad spellings (tumblr.) But now things are getting silly names in juvenile competition. Somebody should edit old science fiction to add this detail: "Sha-zzzing me up, Scotty!"
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