Microsoft Acquired FED.tv Domain For Field Emission Display TV?

A couple days ago I had noticed that Microsoft Corp had acquired the domain name FED.tv as a “Premium .tv” domain from the registry. Many .tv domain names are held by the registry and require a one-time premium payment for the domain name and FED.tv was one of them. After the premium payment, normal renewal fees apply to the domain.

So how much did Microsoft pay for the premium .tv domain from the registry?

Based on information that I received from my source, the domain had a one-time premium fee of: $700

I thought that price seemed really fair for the domain, considering what Microsoft may use it for and clearly based on the amount paid for a lot of domains in general and the ones held by the registry.

So why did Microsoft register the domain name and pay $700 for it?

Really hard to say at this point. FED is a acronym for “Field Emission Display” and with the .tv following the domain, it would hint to a television as the .tv domains often relate to video/TV.

According to Wikipedia:

A field emission display (FED) is a flat panel display technology that uses large-area field electron emission sources to provide electrons that strike colored phosphor to produce a color image. In a general sense, an FED consists of a matrix of cathode ray tubes, each tube producing a single sub-pixel, grouped in threes to form red-green-blue (RGB) pixels. FEDs combine the advantages of CRTs, namely their high contrast levels and very fast response times, with the packaging advantages of LCD and other flat panel technologies. They also offer the possibility of requiring less power, about half that of an LCD system.

Both early players Sony and Canon gave up efforts on FED technology but maybe Microsoft has discovered something the others could not.

Domain names can be early indicators as to what a company may be up to and this very well could be the case here. I wasn’t able to find much other information currently if Microsoft is making a play on the FED technology. Clearly there is potential that the acronym may mean something totally different, but I would suspect that it in general it would be related to video/TV due to the .tv TLD.

The FED.tv domain currently resolves to a Bing.com search for the matching FED term, as Microsoft often does with many of it’s “new” domain names.

Related Posts

4 thoughts on “Microsoft Acquired FED.tv Domain For Field Emission Display TV?

  1. I guess the next question might be does this acquisition indicate Microsoft might be preparing to go on a .TV shopping spree and if so what sort of keywords might they be looking for?

Comments are closed.