dotTV Extends Registration Service to Other Languages

[London, ENGLAND] dotTV, the registrar that has cornered the market for .tv registrations, announced Monday it is launching German, French, Spanish, Korean, Japanese, and Chinese language Web sites.

Users in the Far East will be able to register .tv domain names in Asian characters for Korean, Japanese, and Chinese, while German, French, Spanish users will also be able to register in their own languages.

Making it all possible is an agreement between dotTV and the country of Tuvalu, the geographical location of which sends most people hunting for the atlas. A former British colony known as the Ellice Islands, Tuvalu is about a tenth the size of Washington, DC, and consists of nine coral atolls in the South Pacific, about half-way between Hawaii and Australia.

Geography is largely irrelevant in the age of the Internet, a the .tv domain will be populated mostly by Web sites that focus on television rather than Tuvalu.

"With the success of the multi-language home site, dotTV continues to globally expand its brand, making the .tv home site easily usable to Internet users around the world," said Lou Kerner, chief executive of dotTV.

Thomas Schulz, director of international business development for dotTV, said the expansion into other languages besides English demonstrated dotTV's role in the evolution of the Internet.

GreatDomains.com, the appraiser and marketplace for domain names, believes the .tv top-level domain has already achieved an overall value rating second only to .com. With this level of interest, it is not surprising that dotTV has opened its foreign language sites.

Meanwhile, life carries on in Funafuti, the capital of Tuvalu, much as before. Defense expenditure is zero; GNP is around US $7.8 million, largely from fishing, tourism, copra, coconuts and fish. As for communication: the islands' population of 9,991 share 108 telephones and 8 kilometers of highway.