DotTV Wants to Be Your Domain

DotTV Wants to Be Your Domain

DotTV Wants to Be Your Domain

Hoping to break from the pack of teeny domains like .tm, .md, and .to, .tv has launched a major advertising campaign, touting itself as the perfect symbol for the Internet's future.

The dotTV company of Pasadena, California, is behind the print, radio, and outdoor ads, which started running this summer in national newspapers like The New York Times and on radio stations in 12 major cities.

DotTV, funded primarily by the Idealab company, formed after a Canadian entrepreneur bought the rights to the .tv domain from the remote South Pacific island nation of Tuvalu in 1998. In turn, Tuvalu gets a seat on the board of directors and $50 million over 12 years.

DotTV's new ads position it as a domain whose potential goes far beyond its natural and universal association with television.

The company has attracted a number of high-profile clients, including the PAX TV network and the Emmy awards. It also has auctioned off its,, and domains for $100,000 a piece. It hopes to attract businesses beyond traditional television outlets.

"DotTV is a reflection of a new kind of Internet, with rich media, broadband, all those things," said marketing director Rob Kostich.

But will dotTV's ads manage to convince businesses in a widespread way that .tv is the next .com?

And will users ever come to see domains other than .com, .net, and .org as anything worth paying attention to?

Thus far, the track record for trendy, country-code, top-level domains is not so great.

In 1998, .tm, Turkmenistan's domain, ran into trouble when that country's government got upset because it considered some .tm domains obscene. Further .tm registrations, sold by NetNames, were put on hold and remain inactive.

And despite the catchy word-associations of Tonga's .to, Moldavia's .md, and the Niue nation's .nu, registrations of these names have not become a mainstream business phenomenon since their late-1990s launches.

"Most of the country-level domains have fewer than 100,000 registrants," said Bear Stearns analyst Robert Fagin.
Fagin said, however, that .tv stands out from the crowd and has a real chance of catching on.

"With the explosion of streaming media and broadband content, there's really no better time for them to position themselves as a marker for it," he said. Fagin added that companies with .com domains may want to branch out into .tv domains to highlight and distinguish their rich media projects.

But another analyst said it's going to take more than an ad campaign to turn people on to .tv, because broadband as a mainstream reality is years away by even optimistic estimates.

"You're really going to need a major technology and paradigm shift for something like this to be accepted, and that's just not feasible right now," said Preston Dodd of Jupiter Communications.

He said a multitude of popular domains would prove problematic to many companies because many already have bought up hundreds of domain names related to their businesses to ward off cybersquatters.

"The last thing they're going to want to see is a proliferation of domains, because it becomes a big administration headache," he said.

It may be a better idea to wait until the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, the world's domain-name governing body, decides on whether to allow names like .biz, .ecom, and .firm to become top-level domains, according to Forrester Research analyst Carl Howe.

"I think those alternatives to .com, .org, and .net have a better chance of gaining wide acceptance mainly because everyone's going to have agreed on them, instead of paying a company a lot for a name they happened to grab onto early," Howe said.

ICANN negotiations over new, officially recognized domain names are expected to continue into the beginning of next year.