.tv domain names

What .tv is

.tv is the country-code top-level domain (ccTLD — a two-letter extension assigned to a country or territory under the ISO 3166-1 standard) for Tuvalu, a Polynesian island nation in the Pacific with a population of roughly 11,000. IANA classifies it as country-code, not generic. It was delegated on 18 March 1996.

The generic pitch needs no explanation anywhere: TV means television. .tv is the original example of a country code sold for its English meaning rather than its geography, commercialised from 1998 onward, a decade before other ccTLDs attempted the same. Essentially no .tv registrant has any connection to Tuvalu.

The sponsoring organisation and administrative contact at IANA is Tuvalu's Ministry of Transport, Energy, Communications and Innovations. The registry is operated under licence by GoDaddy Registry, with the technical contact in Tempe, Arizona, on a record last updated 4 September 2025. The operator changed recently: VeriSign had run the business since 2001, but on 14 December 2021 Tuvalu announced it had selected GoDaddy Registry; migration completed in November 2022 and Tuvalu's Department of Foreign Affairs confirmed the transition on 21 November 2022.

Who can register .tv

.tv is fully open. Anyone anywhere may register and transfer .tv domains, with no local presence requirement, no Tuvaluan nexus, no eligibility declaration and no documentation. There is nothing to be audited on and nothing to get wrong.

Two structural notes. The registry reserves com.tv, net.tv, org.tv and gov.tv, so those third levels are unavailable. And the label rules are unusually permissive at the short end: 1 to 63 characters, letters, digits and hyphens, starting and ending with an alphanumeric. The one-character minimum is real — single-character .tv names exist, and they sit in the registry's premium tiers.

What .tv costs to own

Premium tiering is the single most important thing to understand about .tv, and the source of more registrant grief than anything else about it. A large proportion of the names anyone would want are registry-premium rather than standard-priced: short labels, one- to three-character names, dictionary words, media and streaming keywords, and obvious brandables are overwhelmingly tiered.

The critical mechanic is that premium .tv names carry premium renewal pricing that recurs every year. It is not a one-off surcharge that resolves into a normal renewal afterwards, so someone budgeting for an expensive purchase and a routine renewal has mis-modelled the ten-year cost badly. Before buying any .tv, check whether the name is a registry premium, and check the renewal specifically rather than the first-year price.

Standard, non-premium .tv follows an ordinary structure: promotional first-year retail pricing, higher standing renewal. Two further points belong on the record. The registry has historically adjusted premium tiers on existing registrations, and registrants publicly reported premium renewal increases around the GoDaddy Registry transition; whether a registry may re-tier an already registered domain has been a live industry question. And restoration after expiry costs substantially more than a renewal, calculated against the premium tier where the name is tiered.

Registration terms, renewals, and transfers

.tv registers for one to ten years in whole-year increments, with no unusual minimum and no short ceiling.

Transfers use the standard EPP authorization code mechanism: obtain the auth code from the losing registrar, unlock the domain, submit the code at the gaining registrar. The domain must be more than 60 days old and must not have been transferred in the previous 60 days. A transfer renews the domain for the minimum allowed period, so the move carries a cost — and where the name is registry-premium that renewal is calculated at the premium rate. Portfolio consolidation on .tv should be priced before it is scheduled.

Expiry runs as follows: renewal remains possible for roughly 45 days after expiration; then a redemption and restore window of around 30 days, during which only the original registrant can recover the name and only on payment of a restore fee; then five days of pending delete. As with any country code, these windows are registry policy rather than ICANN-mandated, so confirm the day counts with your registrar.

WHOIS, RDAP, and privacy

The authoritative WHOIS server is whois.nic.tv. RDAP — the Registration Data Access Protocol, which serves structured JSON registration data in place of port-43 WHOIS text — is available through GoDaddy Registry.

Privacy and proxy services are permitted and widely offered by registrars. The caveat that applies to every country code applies here: .tv is not bound by ICANN's consensus policies for generic extensions, including the Registration Data Policy that governs redaction on .com. What is published and what is withheld follows registry and registrar policy rather than an ICANN mandate. In practice the output looks much like a generic extension's; the obligation behind it differs in kind.

DNSSEC — cryptographic signing that allows a resolver to verify a DNS answer has not been altered in transit — is supported, as are internationalised domain names. There are no unusual technical requirements attached to running a site on .tv: no mandatory encryption, no browser preload behaviour, nothing that distinguishes it operationally from a conventional extension.

Who .tv suits, and who should avoid it

State the obvious first, because the marketing does not. .tv is Tuvalu's country code, licensed commercially to a registry operator by a sovereign government that has renegotiated the terms repeatedly since 1998. It is not a generic extension. Tuvalu sets the terms, chooses the operator and takes a royalty.

.tv suits video, streaming, broadcast, esports, live content, video podcasting, film and television production. It is the most semantically precise extension in wide commercial use: it says exactly one thing, says it to everyone, and needs no explanation in any market. Channels, networks and creator brands whose call to action is watch this get real work out of it. It also suits media companies with the budget to hold a premium name indefinitely.

It suits almost nobody else. A business that is not about watchable content is fighting the extension rather than using it; a consultancy or a B2B software product on .tv reads as a mistake the visitor has to mentally correct. Budget-conscious projects and speculative portfolios should be wary, because premium tiering makes .tv expensive to carry at volume. And anyone hoping that a well-known streaming platform's use of .tv confers reflected credibility should discount that: .tv is widely used, including by low-quality operators.

Common mistakes with .tv

Buying a premium .tv without checking the renewal price. The acquisition cost is displayed prominently; the recurring premium renewal often is not. This is the defining .tv mistake, and it converts a one-off decision into a permanent annual liability many registrants never modelled.

Assuming .tv is a generic extension. It is Tuvalu's country code, licensed commercially. A sovereign government sets the terms and has renegotiated them repeatedly — in 1999, 2001, 2011, 2021 and, according to one 2026 report, again more recently.

Using .tv for a business with nothing to watch. The semantic bind is total. If a visitor arrives expecting video and finds a services page, the extension has actively worked against you.

Overlooking that a transfer renews at the premium rate. Where the name is tiered, a transfer triggers a minimum-period renewal calculated against the premium tier — an unpleasant surprise in the middle of a portfolio consolidation.

The first country code ever sold, and a nation legislating for its own permanence

Every country code sold generically follows a business model Tuvalu invented. A 1998 agreement, associated with Jason Chapnic and Information.ca, promised Tuvalu US$50 million upfront to manage and market .tv through 2048; the buyer failed to deliver the payment and the rights were reassigned. Idealab then took the licence through .tv Corporation International, on reported terms of US$12.5 million upfront plus US$1 million a quarter and an equity stake for Tuvalu. On 31 December 2001 VeriSign acquired the registry business for US$45 million in cash; quarterly payments were renegotiated to a reported US$550,000 and the agreement ran to 2011, then through 31 December 2021. Tuvalu had expressed dissatisfaction with payment levels by 2010.

What this has meant for a country of roughly 11,000 people is hard to overstate. In 2019 .tv royalties represented 8.4% of the Government of Tuvalu's revenue, and post-2014 payments of roughly US$5 million a year were characterised as around one-twelfth of national gross national income. Under the GoDaddy agreement reported annual revenue rose to roughly US$10 million, and a 2026 source projects approximately US$12.6 million to the national budget following a renegotiation — a single-source projection, not a confirmed figure. The 2021 change of operator is the useful precedent: VeriSign did not renew, Tuvalu selected GoDaddy Registry, and registrants experienced a change of backend and nothing else.

One risk .tv carries that no other registry does is physical. Tuvalu is among the nations most exposed to sea level rise, and large parts of its territory are projected to become uninhabitable within decades. That reaches the domain through a specific mechanism: a country code exists because its two-letter code is listed in ISO 3166-1, and that listing follows recognised statehood rather than habitable land. TV is firmly listed today, with no retirement pathway in prospect — and Tuvalu has done more than any other state to keep it that way. In 2023 it amended its constitution to declare its statehood and maritime zones permanent, regardless of what climate change does to its physical territory, and reportedly 26 nations had legally recognised that continuing statehood by early 2026. The Digital Nation programme is building the infrastructure behind the claim: 3D LiDAR scans of all 124 islands and islets forming a digital twin, a Digital Ark preserving cultural records, and digital identity and government services in development, supported by the Tuvalu Vaka submarine cable, operational in 2025.

Whether that legal architecture holds under international law over the very long term is untested, and nobody should claim otherwise in either direction. Even if a code were removed from ISO 3166-1, the established process provides a default five-year phase-out, extendable, with a documented migration plan — not a switch-off. The near- and medium-term risk to a .tv registrant is not climate; it is the premium renewal tier, and a licence renegotiated every decade or so.