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.

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.

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 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!



Internet Video Viewing to Eclipse Broadcast TV Viewing by 2020.
A forecast by The Diffusion Group (TDG) in one of their recent reports. According to Colin Dixon, senior partner and co-author of TDG’s new report, despite the fact that some people might find this news a bit shocking, there is good reason to believe that this estimate is realistic.

Dixon says, “Keep in mind that during this period, Internet and broadcast delivery of video content will become blended in such a way that consumers will be unaware of which conduit serves which content. Because so much of their audience will be consuming online, it is more important than ever that cable and broadcast channels increase their presence online.”

Online Video Ad Revenue To Top $1.3B.
This prediction is from Parks Associates, by way of Online Media Daily. They also say “The report attributes the healthy numbers to steady growth in online video viewership, combined with the ability to target specific viewers based on preferences and viewing history”.

Immer öfter sieht man in Deutschland prominente Webseiten mit einer .tv-Domainendung. Dies ist ein klares Indiz dafür, dass sich die Domain im Bewusstein der Internetnutzer durchgesetzt hat. So haben zahlreiche Fernsehsender wie z.B. Pro7 mit www.prosieben.tv oder Sat1 mit www.sat1.tveigene Online-Mediacenter aufgebaut und bewerben diese auch entsprechend während der Sendezeit. Die Mediacenter sind eigenständige Seiten im Webangebot der Sender und können über die .tv-Domainendung direkt angesurft werden. Auf der Plattform können Nutzer direkt eine verpasste Sendung online abrufen oder spannende Folgen ihrer Lieblingsserie noch einmal ansehen. Auch der FC Bayern München bietet mit der Seite www.fcb.tvein spezifisch auf Online Video zugeschnittenes Webangebot mit Trainingsausschnitten, Interviews und Spiele-Highlights. Und der diesjährige Sieger der INTERNET WORLD Business Idee präsentiert sich ebenfalls auf einer .tv-Domain:www.navabi.tvbietet Mode für Übergrößen und setzt dabei innovative Videopräsentationen ein. Alles gute Gründe, sich in gleich mal eine gute .tv-Domain zu registrieren und selber spannende Inhalte zu kreieren.

(More and more German websites are using the .tv extension to present their innovative media and business ideas online. German tv stations like Pro7 and Sat1 are offering their on-demand media centers with the respective .tv domain (check out www.prosieben.tv or www.sat1.tv). Like with Hulu, everyone can watch a missed episode online or search for any other television show. Famous football club Bayern Muenchen offers a variety of online videos like practicing sessions, interviews with players and the coach or highlights of their recent games, all under www.fcb.tv. And this year’s winner of Germany’s leading internet magazine INTERNET WORLD business contest, a site called www.navabi.tv, is presenting ladies fashion with product video using a .tv extension. All great examples how website owners can present video content with a .tv domain name.)

According to recent survey data from KPMG, few consumers see the need to bring 3-D into the home, with just 15 percent saying they expect to buy a 3-D-capable set the next time they shell out for a new TV.

According to the most recent KPMG Media and Entertainment Barometer, more than a quarter of respondents said they had viewed a 3-D film in the theater over the past 12 months, and those numbers are even higher for 18-24 year olds (42 percent) and 25-34 year olds (45 percent).

Comparatively, only 5 percent of those surveyed said they had watched a 3-D film on TV — and very few seemed to want to, with only about one in six respondents said they were likely to buy a 3-D TV for their next purchase. Only about a quarter of respondents said they would prefer to watch TV in 3-D if it was available, with a third saying they would prefer not to. A whole 42 percent were unsure if they’d prefer to watch 3-D TV, which signals unfamiliarity with the technology.

And, here’s my favorite stat “More than 40 percent said they believed 3-D was a gimmick.” While I’m certainly not a 3D technology expert, my feed-reader is filled with news about 3D and you couldn’t get away from it at CES. My quandary is those glasses. First, you have to find them in your living room (I don’t know about you, but I loose my remote at least once a day). Second, the glasses aren’t interoperable. You can’t use one brand’s glasses with another brand’s TV. So think about the Super Bowl in 3D. Only some of your friends who come for the party can see the event it its full glory. The rest of the party goers will see a screen that makes them feel drunk even if they are only drinking soda. And last, think about how silly you look in those glasses.

All that said, the change and growth in video generally is one of the things that makes this space fun.

What do you think about 3D and how that might play out – not just on the physical set in your living room, but online too?

Later Update: Hey…ask and ye shall receive. I saw this posting on companies that have 3D TVs without the “goofy” glasses. This article suggested that the glasses are what’s holding back the 3D flood waters. While none of these new technologies are without issues, and all are expensive, it shows progress towards something more mass market.