Today we’re happy to present a field report from VeriSign’s Patty Fisher, who offers her reaction and opinions after attending Hostingcon 2010.

This week in Austin, TX hundreds of hosted services companies and technology infrastructure leaders gathered for Hostingcon 2010. The event delivers the newest insights and innovation to the hosting community, and this year the hottest topic was the Cloud.

The Cloud is expected to redefine the industry and open up new opportunities for technology and service providers alike.  There was also lots of buzz around value added services and finding the next golden goose. From enterprise to end-consumer the time old questions, of how do you sell more and how do you build loyalty, still remain relevant. It was surprising to see very little on mobile and the impacts of an on-the-go society…maybe next year.

One of our top domain registrars, eNom, featured .tv at the event as an area of opportunity for their hosting resellers. Now more than ever is the right time for the reseller market to embrace .tv, with the fastest growing online audience is people posting and viewing videos online, and .tv is the preferred destination for web video. .tv is here to stay and will only get bigger as right now over 30% of Internet traffic is video, and is projected to be nearly 40% by the end of 2010. So exciting times are ahead for .tv as that number continues to expand.

eMarketer’s Paul Verna points out rightly in his report that video has become a necessity for companies that are looking to truly impact and engage with their customers and audiences. That goes regardless of what industry you’re in. The audience wants and expects their interactions with brands online to include some sort of video component, so it’s time to get on-board with that or risk being left in the dust.

Some interesting stats:

• Mutichannel Merchant asked retailers to identify rich media features that they used, 46% picked video making it the highest ranked category in the survey. Another 42% said they planned to add capability in the next year.
• Forrester says the percentage of the top 50 US Online retailers that offer video on their sites skyrocketed to 68% in 2009 from 18% in 2008.
• The Society for New Communications Research noted 31% of Fortune 500 companies with public-facing blogs used video blogging in 2009, up from 21% in 2008.
• Ad-ology ’s statistics showed “video ahead of mobile marketing and search optimization as budget priorities for US marketing.”

Online video is entertainment. It’s cars. It’s shoes. It’s shirts. It’s engaging with your users, viewers and customers. And, online video is .tv.

By TDG’s numbers 60%, or 95MM consumers in just the US, are “enthusiastic” about TV Everywhere” services. And, about 34%, or 54MM are willing to pay at least $5 extra a month for the privilege. By my calculations, that’s about $3B a year. Even if that’s lower because of households verses individuals, it’s still a big enough number to get your attention.

Yes, it’s early yet. Michael Greeson, TDG partner and author of the report admits the content isn’t compelling at this stage. But I think it does show the interest users have for video. It’s big and growing.

What do you think? Do you want to watch video anywhere on any device? What would you pay for it?

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.

Se avete recentemente soggiornato in Svizzera, vi sarete spesso imbattuti nella molteplicità delle offerte televisive della nazione elvetica.

La Svizzera, pur con un numero di abitanti relativamente ridotto (appena otto milioni), vanta il ragguardevole primato di avere quattro lingue ufficiali: l’Italiano, il Francese, il Tedesco e il Romancio – quest’ultimo per la verità parlato solo da una stretta minoranza.

Una tale diversità linguistica si concretizza anche a livello di comunicazione nell’opportunità di un’offerta televisiva quanto mai variegata e disponibile su tutto il territorio nazionale.

E proprio in questo settore si fa vedere l’importanza del dominio .TV

La televisione Svizzera tedesca, per esempio, ha recentemente adottato il dominio www.sf.tv

Bene, vi starete chiedendo perché’ mai abbandonare il tanto dominio .ch, particolarmente caro agli Svizzeri.

La risposta e’ in almeno due motivi: il primo e’ che il dominio .tv garantisce alla “Schweizer Fernsehen” una presenza internazionale e una forte trazione a livello di marketing, che va oltre i confini elvetici.

Ma c’e’ anche una ragione più propriamente tecnica: in Svizzera il dominio .ch stabilisce che tutti i nomi di secondo livello debbano essere formati da almeno tre lettere.

A questa regola fanno eccezione solo i nomi dei cantoni: per esempio www.ge.ch per il Cantone Ginevra o www.vd.ch per il Canton Vaud.

Quindi sarebbe impossibile per le televisioni svizzere avere un dominio .ch con solo due lettere, sicuramente più’ facile da ricordare e quindi essere visitato da parte degli internauti elvetici.

L’offerta del sito della Schweizer Fernsehen e’ molto interessante: video podcast, un videoportal che permette di navigare in 3D le trasmissioni del giorno, una sezione interattiva con gadget da scaricare e aggiornamenti automatici per il proprio media center e una versione mobile che può’ essere usufruita da smartphone di ultima generazione.

Continua perciò il successo del dominio .tv per le televisioni in Svizzera e molte altre televisioni si garantiranno presto una formidabile visibilita’ grazie a un dominio .TV

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The success of the .TV domain for Swiss television

If you have recently stayed in Switzerland, you would have often run into the broad offer of the Swiss national television. Switzerland, although with a relatively small population (just eight million), has the remarkable record of having four official languages: Italian, French, German and Romansh – the latter actually spoken only by a small minority.

Such diversity in the languages is present also in the television system and gives the opportunity to offer multilingual channels throughout the country.

In this arena the .TV domain plays an important role.

Swiss German television, for example, has recently adopted the domain www.sf.tv

Well, you’re wondering why to give up the .ch domain, largely used by Swiss companies. There are at least two reasons: first, the. TV extension provides the “Schweizer Fernsehen” with an international presence and strong traction at marketing level, that goes beyond the Swiss borders.

But there is also a more technical reason: the domain .ch in Switzerland states that all the second level names should be formed by at least three letters.
An exception to this rule applies only to the names of the cantons such as Geneva (www.ge.ch) or Vaud (www.vd.ch).

So it would be impossible for televisions to have a .ch Swiss domain with only two letters, certainly easier to remember and then to be visited by Internet users in Switzerland.

The offer of the site and the Schweizer Fernsehen is very interesting, with video podcast, an interactive videoportal, allowing you to navigate in 3D the broadcasts of the day, and a section with gadgets to download, automatic updates for your media center and a mobile version for 3G smartphones.

In line with the success of those channels, more and more Swiss TV stations may register a .TV domain (the word “TV” has the same meaning in Italian, French or German), since it is easier to remember and gives them excellent visibility.

India is a natural market for .tv given the immense popularity of television entertainment and movies in the country. India already has over 110 million pay TV subscribers across cable and satellite TV, and that is slated to grow to 150 million by 2014. The country also has hundreds of national and regional TV channels. Web sites like nautanki.tv have positioned themselves as the TV content destination on the web where Indian content producers and TV channels can upload their content for user viewing. Nautanki also provides users with personalization features (my profile, my channels, etc.) through their iNautanki service.

In comparison to television, the Indian movie industry is much much bigger with over 2 billion people watching Indian movies worldwide. The Indian movie industry (popularly called Bollywood, although that only includes the Hindi movies and not the other regional language movies) is currently estimated at $2.2 billion and produces five times the number of movies that Hollywood does. It is no wonder that sites like bollywood.tv are a big draw for Indian entertainment-hungry fans globally. Not only does the site provide breaking news from Bollywood, it also allows users to search for movies and movie songs, watch movie trailers, listen to bollywood radio, and watch a few free movies as well.

The continued popularity of Indian entertainment coupled with the fast-growing broadband and mobile industry in India provides an interesting opportunity for rich media .tv web sites in terms of consumer usage and engagement.