TV3 has announced this evening that it has dropped the TV from its name in order to better reflect the fact that it is no longer television, and rather just another arbitrary numbered placeholder in the ever-expanding list of increasingly redundant free-to-air stations.

MediaWorks chief content officer Andrew Szusterman says the change is a “positive step forward” to “acceptance” that TV3 is “dead, really.”

“When you look at the TV3 brand as it stands, it’s been around since 2003,” he said. “That’s a long time, and really in that time, we’ve seen a lot of changes. The 2003 brand doesn’t really represent what the channel is in 2017, which isn’t so much TV, as it is just some kind of endless focus group and marketing exercise that never goes anywhere and just hands bigger ratings to our competitors.

“So we thought it made sense to drop the ‘TV’”

In addition to the name change, Three will get a new logo: a cryptic series of symbols and letters that reads “Plus HR equals E”, which Szusterman says is “kind of code language” for “Watch TV One.”

“We knew we wanted to get rid of the TV bit,” said Andy Brown, MediaWorks chief marketing and data officer. “That much was obvious. But of course when you get a new name, you have to have a new logo.

“So I took our team of designers, graphics people and all that, and I said to them ‘just fuck it up.’

“And they looked at me and they said ‘What?’

“And I said, ‘Yeah, no, seriously, just fuck it up. Just make a fucking mess and we’ll call it vibrant.’”