There’s now a billion websites, according to online tracking firm Live Stats, and the internet is getting a little crowded.
A bunch of new top-level domains — those letters that go at the end of a web address — were released to go alongside “.com.” We have “.nyc,” “.sports,” and so on. But one of the most interesting — and popular — domains is “.tv,” and it says a lot about the way television is changing.
Marketplace Tech host Ben Johnson says “.tv” has been around for a while, but it’s being used more and more for branding by emerging media companies. That could be good for the tiny island nation Tuvalu, which was originally assigned the domain and has made a pretty penny from leasing it out.
But more interesting than the rise of “.tv” is the parallel rise of Internet video — just look at Twitch(.tv).
“Video is a vastly expanding area of our vastly expanding internet,” says Johnson. “Cisco estimates 70 percent of total internet traffic by the year 2017 is going to be video, and a lot of that is going to be mobile video.”
That sea change is affecting the physical networks the web is built on and the way video is being delivered to our devices. On a recent visit to Bell Labs, Johnson spoke to researchers looking for ways to make a wireless connection respond to the environment for seamless streaming.
“Say you’re a passenger in the seat of a car or maybe you’re on a train in the future… and you’re about to go into a tunnel,” Johnson says. “They want to use the GPS on your device to tell the network you’re that going underground, and then they want the network to deliver you more data faster before you go into the tunnel.”
So whether your preferred video service is a “.tv” or “.com” website, you’re probably taking up a lot of bandwidth, but the Internet of the future is going to accommodate you better.
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