You’ve heard of the dot-com boom. Is the dot-tv boom next?
On Monday, Amazon said it would pay $1.1 billion for a website that streams people playing video games. The website is called Twitch — but its address is notTwitch.com, but Twitch.tv.
It’s a distinction easily overlooked, but one that highlights an inexorable shift in how people — especially young people — consume video.
Today, as video is watched on smartphones and laptops rather than on living room couches, the .tv suffix — owned, improbably, by the tiny South Pacific island nation of Tuvalu — has become for some companies a chance to signal that they are showing video the way people are increasingly used to seeing it. Last month, 190 million Americans watched online video content, according to comScore.
A .tv web address has become “important from a branding point of view,” said Tony Lorenz, the chief executive of BOB.tv, a company that streams videos related to best business practices.
The sudden prominence of .tv is the latest twist in one of the Internet’s more unusual tales. In the 1990s, the suffix .tv was assigned to Tuvalu (Britain received .uk; France, .fr; and so on). At the height of the Internet gold rush, in 1999, a start-up named DotTV paid Tuvalu $50 million over 12 years for the right to sell .tv to other companies. The .tv suffix represented two of the most recognizable letters in the world, and DotTV’s founders believed .tv could be bigger than .com because TV viewing would soon migrate to the web.
China.tv was sold for $100,000 a year to an Internet service provider in China, according to Lou Kerner, a venture capitalist who, in 2000, left his job at Goldman Sachs to become chief executive of DotTV.
DotTV was onto something, though the idea was a bit premature, as a lack of broadband limited the growth and quality of online video.
In 2002, Verisign, a large manager of web addresses, acquired the company and still operates the .tv domain today. It agreed in 2011 to manage the .tv address through 2021, and the payments to Tuvalu’s government are said to be a couple million dollars a year.
Those dividend payments are an important revenue source for the country, which has a population of barely 10,000 who live on a tiny cluster of coral atolls and islands about halfway between Australia and Hawaii.
The economic success of Tuvalu and .tv has led other countries to try to leverage their domain names into a consistent revenue source: Montenegro, for example, has the extension. me that can offer a personal touch to a Web address; and Colombia’s .co has emerged as a logical, less expensive substitute for .com.
But only Tuvalu’s domain name speaks to the changing nature of media consumption around the world.
“The original vision upon which DotTV was founded is coming true before our eyes,” Mr. Kerner said. “It’s just taken longer than we thought, but it could be even bigger than we thought.”
Of course, the fact that a site with a .tv address can vault to extreme popularity speaks to the shrinking importance of the web browser as the way of viewing digital media, as smartphone and tablet apps, and gaming consoles like Xbox and PlayStation, take the lead. But while Verisign does not break out its revenues from .tv domain sales, Internet entrepreneurs and branding consultants say that the .tv suffix has grown in popularity.
There are several examples of major organizations that rely on the .tv domain as the home for video content. Among the most prominent is MLB.tv; the address has been the home for baseball’s paid streaming video offerings dating back 12 years, when the service streamed a Texas Rangers-New York Yankees game to 30,000 fans. FYI.tv streams programming for a newly branded cable channel owned by A&E Networks. Another recognizable brand is Redbull.tv, a web video enterprise owned by the beverage company that streams extreme sports and live entertainment.
Small businesses are also seeing the benefits to .tv. Harry Calbom, who eight years ago helped start a video production company, recently decided to re-brand his company and described how hard it was to find a new name, in part because it was hard to find a suitable website address.
“That’s been the problem to brand yourself the way you want to brand yourself,” he said, adding that “in this market investors have bought up all the names.”
They chose Society, and made inquiries about buyingSociety.com, and the owner “wouldn’t even quote a price, weren’t interested selling,” though Mr. Calbom said he assumed the price would have been in the mid-six figures. The company boughtsociety.tv for $15,000, he said, “and the nice thing about .tv, it does say something.”
And as different suffixes become more common, there is less stigma attached. “I was once shocked when I saw someone using an alternative ending, I thought they were dooming themselves,” said Josh Bourne, a managing partner at FairWinds Partners, a consultant on domain names. “But I’ve changed my opinion,” he said, rattling off prominent examples like Ask.fm (fm for Micronesia) and Bit.ly (ly for Libya). In April 2013, LinkedIn paid $90 million for Pulse.me, a news aggregator.
But occasionally, these unconventional addresses create confusion. Peter Kay has owned Twitch.com since the mid-1990s. Before Twitch.tv, which was started just three years ago, he had barely any traffic to his site. Now, he routinely gets 40,000 unique visitors a day for his site, which promotes his music educational apps; on Tuesday, he got 60,000 visitors. Yesterday, he sold 10 apps about Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons” at $5.99 each.
“I had no master plan,” he said. “But it keeps me in beer money.”
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