“We are very proud to partner with the Government of Tuvalu and we are convinced that together we can position the .tv ccTLD for significant worldwide growth and a new era of brand awareness and community engagement,” said George Pongas, Senior Director for Business Development at GoDaddy Registry. “As a powerful domain brand synonymous with online video, animation and streaming content, .tv is an ideal platform to help entrepreneurs, businesses and brands worldwide to tell their stories, engage with their customers and drive sales.”

.tv adds to the growing stable of top-level domains GoDaddy Registry provides backend registry services for, now numbering well over 200. The stable includes ccTLDs like .us, .co and .in as well as 223 new generic top-level domains, the largest of which are .club with 977,000 domain names under management, .vip (691,000) and .buzz (545,000) according to nTLDstats.

“GoDaddy Registry shares our vision of growing the universal .tv namespace and will no doubt deploy the same kind of product innovation and industry-leading marketing strategies for .tv that they have applied in their work with other leading ccTLDs,” said the Honorable Simon Kofe, Minister for Justice, Communication and Foreign Affairs for the Government of Tuvalu. “As we seek to secure Tuvalu’s digital future in the face of rising sea levels, our partnership with GoDaddy Registry will provide much needed support to our country and our cause.”

In the late 1990s Tuvalu sold the rights to sell .tv domain names in the late 1990s to .tv Corp. .tv Corp was bought by Verisign for $45 million in 2002. There have been reports the Tuvaluan government had been unhappy with the Verisign contract for which the country received $2 million per year until around 2010, $3 million per year until 2016 and then $5 million per year, around 7% of GDP, when the contract was renegotiated. While no financial details have been revealed, it is expected Tuvalu will receive significantly more revenue from the deal with GoDaddy Registry. It is believed Verisign didn’t submit a bid in the competitive tender.

Now that the contract has been signed, GoDaddy Registry say the significant work of migrating the .tv namespace to GoDaddy Registry’s platform will commence. This includes extensive technical preparations and collaboration with government, industry and business stakeholders. With the transition to GoDaddy Registry, the .tv domain extension will be poised for its next phase of global growth and impact.