Twenty-five years ago, MTV was best-known for music videos starring Michael Jackson and Madonna. These days, its reigning queen isn't even a recording star: Nicole "Snooki" Polizzi, the rowdy party girl from the reality show Jersey Shore.

Perhaps nobody should be surprised, then, that the 29-year-old network recently did the inevitable and scraped Music Television off its corporate logo. The change marked an acknowledgment of the obvious: MTV has become a reality network that occasionally carries programs related to music.

The shift is considered significant because, in an era of rapid technological changes and microscopic attention spans, network identification matters more, according to experts. MTV "realized being 'Music Television' was too limiting," said Dave Howe, president of Syfy, home of series such as Stargate Universe and Battlestar Galactica.

The right brand is essential, Howe said, "to cut through the noise and clutter of the media explosion" bedeviling the TV industry.

He should know.

During the summer, his network underwent a controversial name change -- from the Sci-Fi Channel to Syfy, a made-up word that Twitter users said looked more like the name of a mop or gossip magazine than that of a cable network. One newspaper called it the "dumbest re-branding ever."

But the name change has re-

energized the network and sharpened its identity, Howe said. Because sci-fi refers to an established genre, the name could not be trademark-protected -- an important consideration for a network looking to establish an identity.

Also, Howe said, sci-fi evoked images of "space, aliens and the future," turning off some viewers and advertisers.

"We totally expected there to be a backlash from core sci-fi fans," Howe said. But the shift has "far exceeded our expectations. . . . It's opened up the network to a broader range of viewers" and helped boost ratings.

Viewers had moved beyond the words in the old logo, officials said.

"The people who watch it today . . . don't refer to MTV as 'Music Television,'  " marketing head Tina Exarhos said.

Other networks have gone further:

• In 2003, Viacom re-branded the New TNN, which rose from the ashes of The Nashville Network, as Spike TV, a network targeted aggressively at males. (These days, it is simply called Spike.)

• The Learning Channel was originally an outpost for little-watched educational fare; as TLC, it booted the explicit reference to self-improvement and achieved recognition as the purveyor of Jon & Kate Plus 8.

Often, outlets extensively overhaul programming -- and chase higher ratings -- without switching names:

• Over the years, Bravo has moved away from foreign and art movies and reinvented itself as an outpost of hip reality shows such as Queer Eye for the Straight Guy and Top Chef.

• The defunct A&E fine-arts shows, such as Breakfast With the Arts, are a far cry from Gene Simmons Family Jewels and the other reality shows that rule the network.

The generic names -- Music Television, Sci-Fi, Arts & Entertainment -- date from the dawn of multichannel television, Howe said, when it was enough to let viewers know the type of programming being offered. Such an approach poses problems in the teeming modern media market.

"It's too old-fashioned," he said. "You might as well be called Milk or Gas." Ira Kalb, a veteran marketing expert who teaches at the University of Southern California, compared the MTV logo change to the Apple Computer decision in 2007 to call itself Apple Inc.

The shift signified that the company's focus encompassed a broad range of tech products, such as the iPhone and the iPod. The name change might seem minor, but consumers absorb such branding shifts over time. Other analysts, while conceding the importance of brands, wonder whether such marketing concepts will matter in what might be shaping up as a post-network age.

Kathy Sharpe, CEO of the New York marketing company Sharpe Partners, noted that, whatever the name or logo, MTV might no longer have the centrality in young people's lives: "MTV isn't really competing with VH1 or Fuse. It's competing with Facebook and YouTube."