.TUBE launches tomorrow.
Tomorrow, July 7th, .TUBE will be available for public registration at 14:00 UTC through domain registrars around the world.
Intellectual property attorney and ESQwire.com partner, Jason Schaeffer, is a co-founder of .TUBE.
Jason, who is also known as @MrGTLD on Twitter, will continue fighting the good fight at ESQwire, and shared with us the excitement of helping bring a new gTLD to the consumer market.
So what exactly is .TUBE?
.TUBE is a new gTLD built as “the domain for people who create, watch, and share video.”
With thousands of active TUBE sites, what began as a term for television is now available to help users identify their online-video-channels to customers, followers and fans. Whatever your interest or passion, there’s a .TUBE domain name and channel waiting for you.
Recognizing the need for brands and individuals to manage their online identities – the team at .TUBE created a branded .TUBE Theme and “Video Curator” Plugin for WordPress that you can use to quickly get a video gallery type site up and running on your new .TUBE domain name.
The plugin lets you grab videos from YouTube or Vimeo and create WordPress posts with one click. And the theme turns them into a site that makes it easy to create new content and monetize. Users can essentially build whatever suits them – a website to stream, host or post new video, and also showcase their video from 3rd party sites.
And now for some fun details.
Jason Schaeffer attends ICANN meetings regularly, and before ICANN56 switched from Panama to Helsinki, Finland, he had his cool Panama hat ready.
Instead, and while he was preparing the final touches for the .TUBE launch, he was caught in the cold Finnish rain. With ICANN changing Puerto Rico to Hyderabad, India, who knows what will happen next. He might need a new hat. 😀
All kidding aside, the effort behind .TUBE is the result of hard, serious, but fun work.
Jason Schaeffer and Constantine Roussos of .Music enjoy the cold rain during ICANN56 in Helsinki, Finland.
.TUBE is owned by Latin American Telecom LLC. The company was founded by industry entrepreneur, Rami Schwartz, who came up with the idea for .TUBE in 2008 when he purchased thousands of *tube.com domains.
Schwartz got started by owning many Spanish .com domains, and his crown jewel was Mexico.com.
The shift was made in 2010 to securing a new gTLD and moving to a new direction. After a five year duel with ICANN, the company prevailed against Google and Donuts in a private auction, securing .TUBE.
The .TUBE domain pricing will be kept low and affordable for end-users to create content that can enjoy and monetize easily. With tens of thousands of content streamers worldwide, .TUBE is the ideal gTLD that clearly indicates what a web site is all about.
With the .TUBE Theme and Video Curator Plugin for WordPress you can create a perfectly-branded, mobile-friendly website and painlessly curate videos into posts without touching a line of code!
Premium domains will revert to regular pricing for annual renewals, a refreshing approach. Non-premium domains will be in the $30 dollar range, depending on which domain registrar you use.
An example of a .TUBE domain with theme and the Video Curator WordPress plugin enabled.
In a special arrangement with Epik, registrants of .TUBE domains will also receive free web hosting, with the .TUBE video plugin ready to go.
For more information, head over to Get.Tube.
