Status Active | Sponsor Government of Tuvalu | |
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Introduced 1996; 21 years ago (1996) TLD type Country code top-level domain Registry The .tv Corporation (a Verisign company) Intended use Entities connected with Tuvalu | ||
The domain name .tv is the Internet country code top-level domain (ccTLD) for Tuvalu.
Contents
Except for reserved names like com.tv, net.tv, org.tv and others, any person may register second-level domains in TV. The domain name is popular, and thus economically valuable, because it is an abbreviation of the word television.
Verisign
The domain is currently operated by dotTV, a Verisign company; the Tuvalu government owns twenty percent of the company. In 1999, Tuvalu negotiated a contract leasing its Internet domain name ".tv" to a company formed by idealab for $50 million in royalties over a 12-year period. The Tuvalu government receives a quarterly payment of US$1 million for use of the top-level domain. Lou Kerner joined .tv as its CEO in January 2000, and the company began selling .tv domain names in April 2000. Verisign acquired .tv in December 2001.
On 14 December 2006, Verisign announced an alliance with Demand Media, run by former MySpace chairman Richard Rosenblatt to market the .tv top level domain name (TLD) as the preferred Web address for rich media content. ".TV" premium names cannot be transferred to another registrar. Annual renewal fees for .TV premium names are the same as the initial "buy now" registration fee.
On 16 March 2010, Sedo announced that it teamed up with Verisign to hold an exclusive auction on 1 April for 115 premium .TV domain names that would carry standard non-premium annual renewals regardless of the closing auction price. On 19 March, Verisign announced that premium .TV names would now be available through an expanded .TV registrar channel, slashed prices on premium .TV names, and made a significant number of high sought after premium .TV names non-premium. As a result, Verisign essentially lifted the roadblock that previously discouraged investment in the .TV extension by major domainers, investors, and developers.
Because of Verisign's involvement, and the fact that Verisign is based in the United States, it is subject to United States law. The first .tv domains were seized by the U.S. government as part of Operation Fake Sweep prior to Super Bowl XLVI.
Content stations
Websites with the .tv domain often feature video content for specific brands or firms. Publications like Nylon and Pitchfork Media run sub-stations of their online publications strictly for original video content. Marketing firms like Vice in New York have received contracts to create brand-tailored .tv content stations, such as Motherboard.tv for Dell and the Creator's Project for Intel have given this domain type more visibility, and inspired the creation of independent content stations at the college level across the United States such as Massive.tv at Northwestern University, Maingreen.tv at Brown University, and Kuumba.tv at Washington University.
co.tv
"co.tv" is not an official hierarchy; it is a domain (co.tv) owned by a company who offers free subdomain redirection services, like co.nr.
This company offers free co.tv subdomains. Due to the large use by website spammers of subdomains from co.tv in July 2011 Google removed .co.tv websites from its search results. This had no impact on other .tv websites.
According to Lucian Constantin at Softpedia, "CO.TV is a free domain provider that is obviously being abused by the people behind this campaign. All of the rogue domains used are hosted on the same IP address."