First of all I must say that I feel embarassed simplifying a country’s potential tragody, I hope that Tuvalu wont sink for their and our sake.
So, lets get to the point of this article; there is an urban legend saying that .tv domains will stop existing just after Tuvalu sinks making this cctld absent since its future is attached with Tuvalu’s future as a country.

I m sure many companies or individuals are hesitant to invest their money with .tv’s because of this reason but not only(.tv’s cctld bizarre pricing model gets almost all the credit).
In order to clear this myth, once and I hope for all I tried to search related info on the web and I got lucky finding some good answers coming from trustworthy sources.

As my reply in a comment I received about John.TV some months ago same question about .tv’s and what will happen if Tuvalu sinks has already been asked by a USA Today journalist Kevin Maney,back in 2004, and replied by Verisign’s spokesman Tom Galvin is that “… a defunct country’s Internet domain lives on. For instance, you can still find addresses on .su — the domain for the Soviet Union.“

Thats a clear statement coming from Verisign which conrols among other tld’s .tv cctld leaving no doubt about what will happen if a country like Tuvalu stops to exist physically. I should add that perhaps Tuvalu would be the first cyber-country on this planet making room for other to follow.

Below you can find the list with domains that will be auctioned by Moniker and Snapnames on their TV Auction Showcase!

(Find more info about Moniker and Snapnames .TV auction here)

My first comment is that reserve prices are very reasonable, priced to sell. To be more specific I m impressed on low reserve price for LL.TV’s which seem to dominate the auction list.
Could be a good oppurtunity for newbies to enter the. tv world and grab some of the precious LL.TV’s listed.

It seems that Snapnames with Moniker will be having an auction for premium .tv domains reserved by Verisign from March 9th untill March 23th. Auction starts at 3:15 pm EST Time.
Verisign has reserved several .tv domains such as Air.TV, Stocks.TV and Bargains.TV which be auctioned in this Moniker special .tv domain auction.

Domain catalog for Moniker .tv auction will soon be announced here. Be sure to bookmark this link and pay a visit often if you want to check out available .tv’s for this auction.

Verisign clearly tries to change the way that .tv’s are promoted and used since the last 12 months they made some huge steps forward that include a revision of the so-called premium .tv’s by removing high annual renewal fees and replacing them with one time premium reg fee and one premium auction with Sedo.com(held on April 1st 2010) which generated $800K in sales.

Upcoming auction with Moniker will bring more awareness amongst US domainers and endusers for .tv cctld(which is treated as a gtld from Google) making it an appealing alternative for overpriced .com’s.

Moniker didn’t make clear if other domains except ones from Verisign could be added to this auction so we are going to ask them comment on this one and get back soon.

Snapnames.tv redirects to Moniker.com/tv where you can read all related info about this .tv auction.

Recent sale of MTS.TV at sedo for $33,500 created a growing interest for brandable LLL .tv’s, in fact there is a NamePros topic that monitors LLL.tv’s still available for registration.
Many .tv domainers rushed to register some random LLL.TV’s having a normal reg fee while few others registered some higher quality LLL.TV’s with a premium reg fee.
My latest acquisition was jfm.tv which was instantly used as a bit.ly shorten url, taking advantage of their api.

While LLL.TV’s have nothing in common with the .com equivalent there is still some value behind them mostly for those that consist real worlds or can be easily branded.

I had few offers on my most popular LLL.TV from endusers and resellers months before the MTS sale happened and I must admit that I was waiting for a big sale to happen being a strong believer for LLL.TV’s even though I don’t own many of  them(well that can easily change in the next weeks).

If you are looking for some high quality LLL .tv domains then check out my sales page

Many domainers were afraid to buy any .tv’s since they feel while being a cctld Google will treat those domains as such.
Even though no one would argue over this we know that Google treats many cctld’s as gtld’s, according to John Mueller(Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google) .TV is one of them.
I originally read about this on namepros forum some minutes ago, where Ammudamus posted a topic under title Google: We Treat .tv as a gTLD.
His post was referring on related Watch.tv blog post by Michaela about a reply someone received on Google Webmaster Blog entry about Region Tags in Google Search Results which was originaly published almost a year ago(December 01, 2009) when he asked this same question.
In that blog entry Ian M posted the following question on December 8, 2009:

@John Mueller – what about .tv? Is that treated as a gTLD?

and he received the following answer by John Mueller:

@Ian M, yes, we treat .tv as a gTLD. You can see these tags by searching selectively, eg for [fernsehen site:tv].

So its very clear that .tv being a cctld will rank for the geo it represents(that is Tuvalu) but the same time its considered as a gTLD because of its global brand since TV is the most common and recognizable term for media, entertainent and video globally.

I ve just received an email from Enom.tv letting me know about a special .tv promotion they are running having every .tv domain registration at $12.99 for one year.

Thats a pretty good reg fee for .tv’s so I m going to try them out.
additional details for this offer:

* “The promotional discount for non-premium .tv domains is reflected in the shopping cart after entering your .tv promotional code. This price expires August 31, 2010 at 11:59 PM PT.
[...]Pricing valid on new non-premium 1-yr registrations only.”

In order to take advantage of this offer you must “Enter promo code 1299TVETV at checkout“.

While ICANN posted an update regarding new Gtld posting it seems that we are getting more closer to announcement of Gtld program launch date.
That said it worths mentioning any relation between new Gtld’s and .tv cctld in particular.

As I mentioned in Morgan Linton blog post, featuring a video interview with Michael Berkens(aka TheDomains.com), certain cctld’s with a meaning like .me and mostly .TV will benefit from gtld launch.

Reason is very simple because the average skilled internet user will get more used typing what they are thinking and not a .com equivalent of their thought. For example when domains like Order.pizza, Buy.gifts, Drink.cocacola, Best.prices, Fast.cars, Credit.cards will have real websites behind them, then its only a matter of time before internet users type in exactly what they think.

That way .tv will reach easier internet users type ins looking for Open.TV, Cable.TV, Satellite.TV, Football.TV etc…

Launch of gltd will give more power to the domains themselves rather than google because internet users will use more and more each day their browser bar typing urls instead of searching them through google.com.

Verisign is still trying to promote .tv in every way. These last 3 months we experienced dropping premium renewal policy and replaced by one time premium reg fee policy. We also experienced a goldrush period of some hours where users could register great .tv’s for a normal reg fee. That resulted having a massive blowout sale for hundreds keyword and geo domains  to lucky “owners”. Next move from Verisign was to start a premium .tv auction with sedo with some great domains like japan.tv, jp.tv, business.tv, learn.tv, job.tv, jobs.tv, learn.tv etc. This auction resulted with 800K in sales making a positive impact to domaining market.

As it seems Verisign doesn’t stop there, maybe trying to gain ground from all these lost years with premium renewal prices, I ve read some hours ago at NamePros .tv subforum that they are running a special promotion letting non premium .tv reg fee for half of the original reg fee(which was about $20-$35) depending on registrar.
This offer will last for the following 3 months at least.

For example current .tv reg fees are:

• Name.com $10.99
• Dynadot $12.99 ($10.99 if you already spent more than $500 with Dynadot last 12 months)
• Enom.TV $20

Eurovision.TV is the most popular song contest in Europe being also one of the longest running TV shows since first broadcast of this show was back in 1956. From that year until now contest is being broadcasted every single year attracting millions of viewers in the final night.

Procedure is very simple, each country member of the European Broadcasting Union(EBU) send its qualifying song to compete with other members. First round of competition is called semifinal hosting all songs from which only few of them make it on the next round. Viewers are asked to place their vote via sms where they can send as many votes as they want to any member except their home country member.
Semi finals are splitted in 2 parts, all members qualified will go to next and final round.

Final night is more glamorous letting all qualified members demonstrate their songs in a live stage with millions of viewers watching them.
Voting procedure is same as the semifinal round, announcing winner of Eurovision contest not only for having a great song but also for having good relations with neighbors of their home country.
This is how politics and music mix together !!!!

Verisign has recently, from March 18 2010, changed its pricing policy for the so called premium domains.
Biggest change of them all is that they totally removed high in price renewals and instead they tagged each premium domain for an one time premium registration fee and each upcoming renewal will be rated as normal .tv reg fee based on registrar policy(see here current .tv domain renewal and registration fees for the most famous registrars).

Another big change was that domains can be registered in a wide variety of registars removing old policy which allowed use to keep premium .tv domains only under Enom for life.