Three out of 250 might not seem like a lot but the fact that all of these sites are video-based in some way reinforces the feeling we have the .tv is an excellent way to brand a video-centric site. All three of them – and countless others who didn’t make this year’s AlwaysOn list – are doing fantastic things by combining an online video strategy and a domain that immediately says to anyone visiting that this site will have something to do with video.

Kudos to these members of the .tv community for showing how innovative online video and .tv can be.

The campaign is part of our longstanding effort to make sure everyone – from video bloggers to marketers looking to create video-heavy sites to media companies of all shapes and sizes – realize just what having a .tv domain can do for their branding.

Listed on the GetSeenOn.tv site are just five of those reasons:

1. Keep control of your own content. Why leave everything in the hands of a third party? If you already have a YouTube channel, then a .tv domain name is a no-brainer.
2. Being on TV was once something for the elite few. Today, everyone is a weblebrity in the making: “Make sure someone else doesn’t steal your star – secure your .tv domain name today!”
3. With your own .tv domain name, you can amplify and extend your own video conversation and focus on the all-important Google Juice/link love that comes with a wholly owned domain name.
4. Your name is who you are – your domain name is who your online presence is. You.tv is YOU online.
5. Video = Immediacy. In the age of the iPhone, iPad, FlipCams, etc., video is the easiest way of projecting yourself and your POV online.

The site also has simple tips on how to get a new video-rich .tv site up and running in no time flat using WordPress, Tumblr or Posterous, all dead-simple software tools that help create sites that are easy to update whenever you have new content, video or otherwise, to publish.

But we want to hear from you! What advantages do you see in having a .tv domain? Leave a comment telling us what kind of content or material you use a .tv domain for and we’ll feature the best ones in a later blog post.

• 50% of Internet users now watch online video weekly or more;
• That’s up from 43% in 2009;
• An additional 5 percentage points growth is expected in the next 12 months;
• Younger male viewers top the list as a category with 85% of males 18-24 watching online video weekly; and
• 38% are interested in the prospect of connecting their computers to TV to watch online video.

Android Wants In On the Mobile Video Rush — Granted, Apple’s getting on the lines, press (both good and bad) and attention recently on their video capabilities. But, when I saw this piece at Connected Planet on what Android is up to in video I thought I’d be contrarian and talk about that instead. To quote the article “While the latest version of Apple’s iconic device is designed for generating video content and communications, the Droid X’s powerful hardware core and new services gear the device toward consuming massive amounts of video content as well as producing it.” Verizon calls the device “a pocket sized home theater”. So, another example of a blur between computers, phones and TVs. Online video is everywhere.  So whether you’re a Apple or Android fan, the good news is they are both going after video if you’re an online video fan.

Happy 4th: And in closing, I embed a video from UStream.tv of fireworks at the Magic Kingdom. Happy birthday all you Americans!

I’ve always said that .tv is synonymous with online video, and it’s great to see another example of that being true. When you watch the video below, you’ll hear some great quotes about how TechCrunch wanted to develop their own channel on the web (“not just a flip cam”) to showcase their writers, the different people who pass through their offices and their original content. Besides using a .tv site to get their online video discovered, they are also using the Ustream.tv platform for their videos – which is a .tv two-fer!

Watch the video to hear what the TechCrunch folks have planned, get a tour of their studio, and see how they occupy the online video intersection between Justin Bieber, kittens, and the iPad.

In ReadRightWeb he describes it as a video delivery platform which “Right now … the service is bare-bones. It’s a form that you can put any video file’s URL in and you’ll get HTML5 embed code and an API to poke it with. Eventually the service will support all kinds of analytics, authentication and even super-simple video editing. “Anyone who can hack a Tumblr or Wordpress theme,” Handroll says, “can be a video editor — and with the same tools.”

In this world of huge online video growth, it should come as no surprise there’s great demand for companies that support that video consumption and growth. Like Boxee.tv, Kylo.tv, and Clicker.tv (all having appeared on this blog before); Handroll.tv chose the .tv community for it’s company. .tv is a great way to tell your visitors and the marketplace that you’re about video.

VeriSign, who runs the .tv Registry, is an active member in the ICANN and Internet community. DNSSEC is another example of that.

When DNS was designed over 25 years ago, there wasn’t much thought given to security. Many people have worked to change that over the past few years, and the result is the DNS security extensions, or DNSSEC for short.  Recently there have been some important milestones in the rollout of DNSSEC and a really important one is imminent: the DNS root zone will soon be fully DNSSEC-enabled.

The root zone is the most important zone in the entire DNS name space. At the lowest level, DNS is a big distributed database and the name space is the tree structure that makes up that distributed database. A zone is an “administrative region” of the name space controlled by a single entity. Zones contain data, such as IP addresses corresponding to computer names, and sometimes they also contain delegations. 

A delegation is a pointer from one zone to another zone below it in the tree-structured name space. This delegation process starts at the root, which is what makes the root zone so important. For example, the root zone delegates the .tv zone, and the .tv zone delegates the watch.tv zone, and the watch.tv zone has an entry for the IP address of blog.watch.tv, which is for the web server, where your web browser retrieved this blog posting.

Devices called recursive name servers look up names in DNS on behalf of clients, such as Macs, PCs, iPhones, refrigerators (eventually!), etc. There are a bunch of clients that use the Internet, so there has to be a recursive name server to perform DNS lookups for them. This means you find recursive name servers at ISPs, commercial enterprises and other large organizations.

Because the DNS database is distributed over the entire world, a lookup can take a long time. Recursive name servers cache the results of lookups to speed up future searches, and that’s where DNS’s lack of security can be a real problem. Without DNSSEC, a recursive name server has to believe the responses it receives. But there are various ways to spoof a recursive name server and feed it bad information, also known as “poisoning its cache”. For example, if a bad guy can poison a recursive name server’s cache to believe that the IP address of www.bigbank.com points to the bad guy’s web server, then any client that uses that recursive name server to look up www.bigbank.com is going to be sent to the bad guy’s bogus web site.

DNSSEC makes cache poisoning much harder by adding digital signatures to DNS data. In a DNSSEC-enabled world, DNS administrators sign the data they put into their zones with a “private key”, and when recursive name servers perform a DNS lookup, the answer they receive includes not only the data they asked for but also a digital signature of that data. 

The recursive name server can validate the digital signature with the zone’s “public key” to ensure that the data is legitimate. The bad guy can’t poison the recursive name server’s cache anymore because he doesn’t have the zone’s private key. Without that private key, he can’t generate the proper digital signature that would make his poison data appear legitimate.

VeriSign and ICANN manage the root zone under agreements with the U.S. Department of Commerce. VeriSign and ICANN have also cooperated to bring DNSSEC to the root zone. The root zone’s key-signing key will be managed by ICANN. This key doesn’t exist yet, but it will be created in a “key ceremony” on June 16, with several representatives from the Internet community present as participants and witnesses.

VeriSign has an important role in DNSSEC for the root zone, too. For years, VeriSign has maintained the definitive database of entries in the root zone and produced the updated file with all the root zone information twice a day, every day. Recently we’ve also started to digitally sign this information, but this data isn’t usable quite yet – those details can be the subject of another entire blog post.  One of the dependencies for making the signed root zone usable is the creation of the key-signing key at the key ceremony on June 16.  After the key is created, it will then be used to sign information that VeriSign needs to include in each signed root zone.

But the biggest day of all is July 15. That’s when the DNSSEC-signed root zone is scheduled to become usable. ICANN will publish the key-signing key and VeriSign will “take the wraps off” the signed root zone. Administrators of recursive name servers all over the Internet will be able to configure the root zone’s key and DNSSEC validation can begin. 

It’s a small step, but it’s also a big step. With DNSSEC enabled in the most important zone on the Internet, rolling out DNSSEC can really begin. For more information, go to www.verisign.com/dnssec.

The latest Domain Name Industry Brief spotlights a new study by the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF), a Washington, D.C.-based think tank. Titled “The Internet Economy 25 Years After .com: Transforming Commerce & Life,” the study draws on a variety of research sources to gauge the commercial impact of the Internet, in conjunction with the 25th anniversary of the first .com domain name registration. With one in four people worldwide estimated to use the Internet today, the report measures the reach of e-commerce in solid terms. For instance, ITIF estimates that the annual global economic benefits of the commercial Internet equal $1.5 trillion — a figure that eclipses the global sales of medicine, investment in renewable energy, and government investment in R&D, combined. ITIF also estimates that, assuming e-commerce continues to grow just half as fast as it grew between 2005 and 2010, then by 2020, it will add $3.8 trillion to the global economy.

The far-reaching ITIF report also provides a snapshot of Internet use and its expanding influence on people throughout the world. Among its findings: 

• In Europe, the percentage of online shoppers grew by 85 percent between 2004 and 2009.
• Experience with online shopping in developing countries is rapidly catching up with that seen in more developed regions. Sixty-three percent of Internet users in Latin American and 70 percent of users in Asia Pacific countries have made at least one purchase online, for example, compared to 85 percent of Internet users in North America and Europe.
• Although online commerce is becoming commonplace worldwide, it’s still more popular in some countries than others. In assessing 30 nations, ITIF found Denmark, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States lead the rest of the world in shopping, selling, and doing business online.
• The country with the highest percentage of adult citizens who have shopped online is Japan, with 52 percent.

“As the ITIF study affirms, the commercial Internet has been a transformational force in the world for the past quarter century,” said Raynor Dahlquist, senior vice president of Naming Services at VeriSign. “To ensure it continues to drive the evolution of entire industries, it’s vital to make strategic and continuous investments in the Internet infrastructure. With Project Apollo, VeriSign is building the infrastructure it believes is essential to manage the Internet’s next wave of growth.”

VeriSign publishes the Domain Name Industry Brief to provide Internet users throughout the world with significant statistical and analytical research and data on the domain name industry and the Internet as a whole. Copies of the 2010 first quarter Domain Name Industry Brief, as well as previous reports, can be obtained here.

• The global online video community will surpass 1B [yes, that's B] users by the end of 2010. This number of people is exceeded only slightly by the populations of China (1.2B) and India (1.1B), making this user group equivalent to the third largest country in the world.
• The average monthly traffic in 2014 will be equivalent to 32MM people streaming Avatar in 3D, continuously for a month.
• It would take over two years to watch the amount of video that will cross global IP networks every second in 2014. It would take 72MM years to watch the amount of video that will cross global IP networks during the calendar year 2014.
• Internet video is now over 1/3 of all consumer Internet traffic, and will approach 40% by the end of 2010. The sum of all forms of video will continue to exceed 91% of global consumer traffic by 2014
• Almost 66% of the world’s mobile data traffic will be video by 2014

OK, so what do all these big numbers mean? It means video is growing incredibly fast. Which means lots of opportunity for .tv!

P.S.  We’re taking nominations for a name for our new virtual country of video watchers. Let us know your entries.

Remember, .tv is the address for rich and dynamic media on the web.  It’s the preferred destination for video, film, animation, user-generated content and rich media of all kinds.  With the growth of video on the web, you don’t want to be left behind!



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