In a rebranding effort some Time Warner Cable employees and viewers are fuming about, all 17 of the cable company’s local news operations including YNN (Upstate NY), NY1 (NYC), and News 14 (the Carolinas) will be renamed “Time Warner Cable News” by the end of this year.

The new look will include a studio makeover, new theme music, and a more uniform presentation across all the news broadcasts.

The experiment in creating the cable company’s local news channel began in Rochester, N.Y. in 1990, even before Time Warner Cable as a brand existed. WGRC-TV was launched by Greater Rochester Cablevision that year with a handful of daily newscasts interspersed with off-network syndicated programming. In 1992, WGRC-TV left channel 5 for channel 9 and was rebranded “GRC9News.” When the newly named Time Warner Cable arrived in town, the channel was rebranded yet again as “R News.”

In August 2009, Time Warner changed the name to YNN (Your News Now) Rochester, just one of several YNN channels operating upstate in Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse, and Albany.

For YNN viewers, it is just one more name change for a news channel that has increasingly shed its veneer of independence from the cable company that lives under the same roof.

NY1 fans are far less sanguine about the change.

“It’s a boneheaded move that will punish a unique, standalone brand like NY1 — by reminding viewers just how corporate TV news has become,” wrote Don Kaplan, the New York Daily News television editor.

“This might be the stupidest media rebranding scheme I’ve ever heard of,” Seth Fletcher, a science writer who lives in Brooklyn, wrote in a Twitter post.

“Time Warner — rebranding NY1 into TWC News might be your dumbest move since merging with AOL,” wrote the band They Might Be Giants.

Time Warner said the change is intended to give the news operation a higher profile and more closely identify it as a cable-only service not available on their biggest competitors, Verizon FiOS and AT&T U-verse.

But critics of the change note most of Time Warner’s local news channels have relentlessly pounded home the channel is only available on Time Warner Cable — never on FiOS, satellite, or U-verse — for years.

At least one observer privately noted the rebranding could be another attempt to cut costs by allowing the news channels to share anchors, reporters, and news content without viewers catching on it isn’t always produced locally. YNN’s network of news channels in upstate New York have already proved this, with certain content produced in Buffalo for viewers in Rochester, Syracuse, and Albany.

Time Warner Cable is also in the process of rebranding its various local and regional sports channels under their new name: Time Warner Cable Sports.