For Broadcast September 27, 2007

I have a couple of friends called Dave; I've watched a film called Dave (quite funny, starring Kevin Kline); and, in the TV lexicon, Dave, was the name mistakenly (and hilariously) used by Trigger when talking to Rodney in Only Fools and Horses.

But I have never thought of Dave as creating "a strong and noisy personality that aligns us with our core male 16 to 34 audience". Those cunning people at UKTV G2 know better because they rebranded their channel - you guessed it - Dave.

Brands have enormous amounts of financial value in them. So much so that serious publications like Business Week actually rank the top global 100 brands by value.

High fliers in the 2006 list include Coke, Dell and American Express and some of the internet's biggest names also appear, with Google at 24 (up from 38 in 2005). The purest media brands on the list are Disney at eight ($28bn) and MTV at 50 ($6.6bn).

But values are volatile and depend on the fortunes (perceived and real) of the company and more specifically the attractiveness of its products.

UKTV G2 has a reason for going dippy over Dave - it is trying to catch the young adult male market that it believes is poorly served on Freeview. Dave will replace UK Bright Ideas on the platform in the same month as Virgin 1 also launches.

A channel named Dave sounds to me like a real throw of the dice, but 13 years ago we all thought Orange (is it a phone or a fruit?) was a pretty dumb bet as the name of a mobile phone company. I can't help thinking that the new boss of UKTV, David "Dave" Abraham, is partly to blame for all this name-changing. Maybe we should be thankful his parents didn't call him Alphonse.

Has the stock market lost faith in independent producers?

What does Shed Media's £19m acquisition of Twenty Twenty for a multiple of about 9.5x EBITA have in common with Ten Alps' purchase of niche publishing titles such as Optometry Today and the Caravan Club Magazine, for more paltry multiples of 2.5x to 3x EBITA?

The strategies couldn't be more different, yet the stock market doesn't seem to be particularly interested in either.

Ten Alps ' shares have touched 70p over the past year, but are now in the low 60s. Similarly, Shed's bold acquisition barely pushed its price above 91p, some way off its 52-week high of 129p. Elsewhere, DCD Media bought three indies this summer but has been gently falling for the past few months. And RDF Media is still suffering from Queengate, riding in the low 190s, down from its 52-week high of 257.5p.

So what's the problem? Many of the issues are company specific but the City seems generally ambivalent towards indies, probably because their future is hard to draw. What is the internet doing to TV? What are broadcasters' budgets going to be over the next five years? Content may be king but who will be producing it and how will it be funded?

The shifting models make Ten Alps' strategy interesting. Chief executive Alex Connock does not want his company to be handcuffed to the fortunes of a few broadcasters and is diversifying into niche publishing. He can build niche broadband TV and live events around titles like Caravan Club Magazine and believes they will eventually get the company noticed by investors.

It's not that Ten Alps isn't interested in "proper TV" just that it sees it as part of a wider business strategy. "We're a media factory, not a media boutique," says Connock.