Spectrum? Nearly Killed ’em!

If you currently have Time Warner Cable, Charter or Bright House, you’ll be seeing a lot of this logo. The new combined company has adopted “spectrum” as the name for all their video and internet services and let me say, that’s not going to confuse anyone, right?

Because “spectrum” is a term we in the industry use all the time to refer to the range of frequencies available for broadcasts. It’s one step away from naming your search engine “internet.” Seriously, what gets into these people? I’m not even going to delve deep into the logo, which for some reason is grey and not rainbow colored, which is what you would expect from a spectrum. Yeah, I get it, the best rainbow logo was already taken generations ago:

and there are some political connotations to rainbows now that there weren’t a few decades ago.

But why would you call your company “spectrum” and not have it actually have a spectrum in the logo? And who got to decide that anyway? I use the word all the time so I don’t think about it, but for the uninitiated it’s going to sound like a mix of “speculum” and “rectum” which, folks are not things you want to combine (“Million to one shot, doc“) and you probably don’t even want to talk about in private conversation. Especially if your company has a reputation for being a pain in the, well, rectum.

Of course all of this will be forgotten if the combined companies end up being pretty good. After all, Comcast as a standalone company is not as bad as other cable companies (ok, not saying much) and their services have the truly abominable name “Xfinity” which just doesn’t sound like a word, period. Xfinity sounds like a person you pay alimony to. But people happily said it, as long as they didn’t have to say “My Xfinity is out again.”

I’ve been in my share of “clinics” and I have a fair idea how this new name got past them; the folks who end up in these things tend to be pretty weird. And I’ll be honest, I’ve not always agreed with the names or features that even my favorite company uses. This isn’t the lowest of the low, to be sure; it’s just something that hit my inbox at the wrong moment and I have been shaking my head at it long enough that I just had to write something down.

So, I’ll just wind up with a suggestion. If this new brand doesn’t work for you, Charter… how about you call your cable product “CABLE.” Because, seriously, you’re not far off that now.

About the Author

Stuart Sweet
Stuart Sweet is the editor-in-chief of The Solid Signal Blog and a "master plumber" at Signal Group, LLC. He is the author of over 10,000 articles and longform tutorials including many posted here. Reach him by clicking on "Contact the Editor" at the bottom of this page.