More entertainment
The world before youtube
2003 - False Hopes On Fantasy Island
By Andy Raskin
December 1, 2003
(Business 2.0) โ Of all the dreams fueled by dotcom hype, few were more irrationally exuberant than those of Tuvalu, a dirt-poor nation of 11,300 citizens living on nine South Pacific atolls. When Internet architects assigned two-letter country codes for foreign Internet sites, Tuvalu was assigned .tv. By 1998 its government was receiving lucrative proposals to arrange the sale of domain names like abc.tv and m.tv. Bikenibeu Paeniu, prime minister at that time, predicted that ".tv will bring Tuvalu $100 million over 10 years"--big money for a country with a gross national product of just $20 million, much of it from foreign aid.
Reality didn't quite live up to the prediction. In 1999, Tuvalu inked a deal with Bill Gross's Idealab to establish Los Angeles-based .TV Corp. as the sole broker of .tv domains. The deal brought Tuvalu $12.5 million up front and an additional $1 million per quarter. But according to government officials, the venture burned through nearly $60 million promoting the domain brand, and in 2002, VeriSign acquired .TV Corp. for $45 million. Tuvalu got $10 million for its share, along with reduced quarterly payments of $550,000. At its mid-2001 peak, the registry contained about 400,000 names (try cnn.tv), though the number has since fallen to half that. The money has gone a long way, bringing electricity to Tuvalu's outer atolls, paved roads to its capital--even membership in the United Nations. Yet a sense of disappointment remains. "It's peanuts," says Paeniu, now Tuvalu's finance minister. "Life here hasn't changed that much."
I know this has been posted elsewhere, bust fast-forward to Dec 06
Dot-tv gets a second chance at life
Back in 2000, the video-specific domain name didn't catch on, but now the time is right for a Web explosion, says Fortune's Adam Lashinsky.
By Adam Lashinsky, Fortune senior writer
December 12 2006: 8:19 PM EST
NEW YORK (Fortune) -- What makes new media so damn entertaining is that yesterday's heroes all too often become today's goats. Yahoo (Charts) and eBay (Charts) could do no wrong two years ago. Today, not so much.
The flip-side is true as well. Social networking sites were the height of stupidity in the last blink of an eye. Today, if you don't get MySpace, LinkedIn and the like, well, you just don't get it.
The Web industry's latest topsy-turvy move revolves around dot-tv, a beaten down idea that's about to get a shot at rebirth.
Dot-tv last appeared on Webby radar screens as the domain name standard that the indefatigable idea man, Bill Gross, purchased at the height of the bubble from the island nation of Tuvalu. (Countries get their own suffixes, like .az and .il, and so on. Tuvalu's several thousand residents fared better by selling .tv to Gross's Idealab than by setting up their own email addresses.)
As was the case several times in his career, Gross was ahead of his time. A domain name devoted to videos wasn't that useful in 2000, and even less so when the music stopped. So he dished dot-tv to Verisign (Charts), which, among other things, runs the domain-parceling business Network Solutions.
Fast forward to 2006, the year of the online video generally and YouTube specifically, and suddenly dot-tv just might be worth something. Beginning Wednesday, Verisign will launch a new marketing program with a startup called Demand Media to leverage its dormant dot-tv property. (It actually runs the company it bought from Gross, .tv Corp.)
If you don't act fast, your opportunity to own "yournamehere.tv" might be gone in a flash. (That was just an illustrative example, by the way. Yournamehere.tv isn't available. Check
www.tv to find out which names are.)
Turning on the bright lights of dot-tv is the brainchild of one of the Internet industry's fastest-rising hypesters, Richard Rosenblatt, the CEO of Demand, based in Santa Monica, Calif. Rosenblatt's the guy who ran Intermix, the previously - and currently - unknown company that housed a meteoric property called MySpace.com. Rosenblatt sold to Rupert Murdoch's News Corp (Charts). in 2005 for hundreds of millions of dollars and promptly started looking for his next gig.
The dot-tv marketing agreement with Verisign is Rosenblatt's biggest splash to date. That is, if you don't count the $220 million he's raised from venture capitalists to buy a motley collection of Web sites and mold them into an insta-media company. (He's already spent $150 million of the loot on nine acquisitions.)
Why would anyone want a Web site ending in the .tv suffix? Allow Rosenblatt to explain. "It's analogous to the way people used Geocities before individual domain names became popular," he says. In other words, back in the day, folks would create pages at Geocities, a site Yahoo bought for gobs of money and has become largely irrelevant. Geocities was cool, though, before people and companies realized they could have their own sites.
That's what Rosenblatt sees happening to dot-tv domain names, which he hopes people will refer to instead as "channels." Demand plans not only to drop the price of most dot-tv suffixes to $20 per year from their current rate of $50, but also to forge a giveaway promotion with big consumer Web sites to stoke the dot-tv fire.
Verisign's plan with Demand is much bigger than encouraging common folk to start their own video channels. By promoting dot-tv, it hopes to draw attention to the tens of thousands of premium dot-tv addresses, er, channels that are available for purchase. If the concept takes off, there's real money to be had there. (Hard to believe, but cars.tv can be yours for just $100,000 per year! Want books.tv? Fork over $30,000 a year and you can have it.)
The dot-tv gimmick makes a lot of sense. Even the most popular videos at YouTube have an arbitrary and confusing Web address that no self-respecting bedroom filmmaker wants to tell her posse about. With one's very own dot-tv address, someone expressing himself at YouTube can tell his new fans how to find his entire collection of videos.
The good people of Tuvalu just might end up regretting their long-ago decision to sell.
