As long as you stay away from premium renewals I believe the criticism of the extension is overdone. True .TV is not .COM but the acquisition cost of the .COM in many cases is at least as cost prohibitive as some premium .TV domains. The SEO benefits are not as strong and you don't get the type-in traffic but you can still get a very brandable domain at an affordable price (non-premium renewals).
I don't think this is really true, the popular search term .tv's that do not have premium renewals are in the minority and most speculators are not holding these types of names. Most are holding low quality regular reg fee names that are likely worth nothing and/or premium names that are popular terms but because of the reg fees are still worth nothing.
You say "the acquisition cost of the .COM in many cases is at least as cost prohibitive as some premium .TV domains" but generally the comparison is between something that is an expense and something that is an asset. Premium .tv's generally have zero capital value. Of course there is exceptinal cases and these are far better bets.
Basically with these premium names you are renting. If you hope to resell the hope is that it will gain value to the extent that the renewals becomes cheap, that is very unlikely. Basically people are trying to resell a lease. If you went to the average accountant and told him how these names worked they'd probably tell these are expenses, not assets.
Assuming the premium .com is bought at market value that is an asset, it is something that can resold in the future, the value may go down or it may go up but it will at least be an asset. Such names start from about $50, the cost isn't prohibitive, the top of the market is prohibitive, but let's not label the whole market by the top end price, at the end of the day values being strong is a good thing not a bad thing. But I think some people like to have it both ways, they claims .com prices being high is a bad thing, then they complain about .tv prices being low. Be careful what you wish for, if you think .tv is good because prices are low that is probably what you'll get when you try to sell.
How many repeat visitors will a parked .COM receive?
Very few, how many repeat visitors will a parked .tv get? At the end of the day it is a pointless debate, yes very few people will return to a parked page. Probably very few people will return to a vacant shop with billboards out the front aswell.
My six-week old website Rutinas.tv (reg fee) already has someone in a central Mexican city who has visited seven times spending an average of nearly 17 minutes each visit. Another in a Southern California town has visited five times spending more than five minutes each visit.
At the end of the day though you can't pay the bills with repeat visitors, let's talk $$$. Having said that it is the same old debate, a website can make money regardless of extension. It doesn't neccessarily say anything for the value of the name.
But you could never acquire that sort of loyalty with a parked .COM.
That isn't saying much. The idea of a parked domain is not to "acquire loyalty". It is to cash on those visitors, to send them somewhere else and take a feee for doing it.
Think of it like a shop where every visitor through the door gets the lousiest experience ever, you don't even a have a product in your shop and has no staff, just a crappy sign written in texta telling people the address of a business down the road who pays you a fee for every referral. Your total expenses are $8 per year and you've never spent anything on making the shop look good. The last time you even visited the shop was 2004, yet every day a steady stream of visitors come to this empty shop wanting to buy stuff.
Any business that can run like that is worth alot of money, it is largely bullet proof and has huge potential for improvement. Basically it couldn't be run any worse no matter how hard you tried. That is a descrption of something that is more of an "investment" than a "business" people will want to buy a shop like that. They won't price it in the same way as something that needs hard work to make money.
