The US company dotTV has registered almost 100,000 .tv Web addresses since April, creating one of the fastest-growing top-level domain names in the history of the Internet.
Other domain names such as .hk, .net and even the ubiquitous .com spent their early days at the start of the 1990s languishing in relative obscurity, but .tv has been in high demand since it became widely available earlier this year.
The majority of the registrations has come in the past three months.
"When you are selling premium beachfront property, you really don't have to explain to people why what you are selling is attractive," said Lou Kerner, chief executive of privately held dotTV.
"You just have to put out the 'for sale' sign and people will come to you." But just like a prime piece of property, the right to use .tv, the most recognised two letters on the planet, is not cheap.
It cost dotTV US$50 million to buy the exclusive rights to .tv names from the remote Pacific island of Tuvalu, and it will cost everyone else up to US$1 million a year to rent some of the most coveted addresses on the Internet.
Registering a common name or a word that appears in the dictionary can cost US$1,000 or more a year. Attractive names such as news.tv or sports.tv cost US$1 million. Tv.tv goes for US$500,000.
So far, no one has paid out the hefty price for the top names, but Kerner is confident they will. One of the priciest names to go so far is China.tv, which Mr Kerner said sold for US$100,000 to Internet service provider Chinago.com.
Kerner said 200 television broadcasters had registered .tv domain names.
Steve Yap, communications director for Web audience measurement firm iamasia, said .tv names were effective in attracting people to Internet sites.
Meanwhile, Bob Neer, dotTV's managing director for Asia, said the company was now taking reservations for domain names written in Chinese, Japanese and Korean. He said Asia accounted for about 15 percent of its business.
