NO NAME yet for the UK’s very own answer to AOL-Time Warner – the merged Telewest-Flextech. However, ever-reticent CEO Adam Singer has revealed that in his view the worst suggestion so far to come from the (doubtless) handsomely paid consultants hired to find a new moniker is YoYo. This despite the fact that it has a nice child-friendly new media ring to it, and would accurately reflect the history of its owner’s fortunes on the stock market over the last few years.

While declining to comment directly on whether he was trying to buy consumer magazine publisher IPC, Singer used the example of acquiring magazines as a hook to pontificate on the future facing platform operators. “What we are looking for is how does broadband find its voice?” he said. “That’s why IPC and EMAP should be of interest. We have been seriously looking at magazines for a long time.” This does not mean ‘masthead television’, though. Pointing out that TV in its early days consisted of “televised radio shows”, Singer said Telewest “wants to be a broadbandcaster”, although what exactly that would mean in practice only time would tell. Broadband, he said, needed to find its “grammar”, just as film had found its grammar (after an early chaotic period where anything goes) with the arrival of DW Griffiths and Birth of a Nation.

Singer dampened expectations that a further merger between Telewest and NTL was anywhere on the cards: “I wouldn’t bank on that speculation.” He suggested that the identity of the companies’ ownership made such a deal unlikely.

Singer also said he believed that the value of Flextech’s joint venture channels with the BBC now amounted to well in excess of pounds1 billion. “We have created a huge amount of value for the BBC,” he said “[The channels] are worth thousands of millions of pounds.” On likely future projects, he was willing to rule out one possibility: he said Flextech had not considered (re-)entering the children’s channel market “for one nanosecond”. Flextech was previously the principal shareholder in The Children’s Channel (TCC).

• Brent Harman, managing director of content at Flextech, will leave the company to join Australia’s Prime Television as CEO. He will be replaced by Mark Luiz, formerly Flextech’s finance director and COO.