October 2008 Archives

Occasionally, it's good to take a break from talking about streaming media recording solutions. Here's a story of something we encounter more often than you think.

Every once in a while, we get people with marginally valuable domain names to sell contacting us and asking for an excessive amount of money. Here's one guy with a somewhat relevant three letter domain we had some fun with. (The domain name and author's name have been changed).

"Bob" wrote:

Hi Bill,

We own site XYZ.com and were looking to sell it.

We would much rather sell it - previously we were entertaining offers in the high 5 figures - let me know your highest bid and maybe we can work something out.

Thanks
Bob

My reply:

Hi Bob - Your site and domain will require a lot of work. Google says you have 1 outside link, and a 2 page rank for the home page, and your Alexa rank is 600,000+, which means you have very little traffic. If you were me, how would you justify a 5 figure price were I to present this to my partners? Thanks, Bill

Bob writes back:

Hi Bill,

It all comes down to supply and demand - we are only interested in getting the current market value.

eg. a similar 3 letter domain sold for $195,000 last week => MCC.com

See the link below:
http://www.dnjournal.com/domainsales.htm

In my opinion, XYZ.com is a much higher quality domain with much more potential...

Try searching XYZ vs MCC on google.com it generate results for 62,100,000
"Results 1 - 10 of about 62,100,000 for xyz. (0.05 seconds) "

The XYZ.com domain is clearly more valuable than other simple 3 Letter dot com domains e.g. MCC.com

With the right promotion & development this domain can easily be turned into an 8 figure/year operation.

Due to the current economic situation, I would be willing to let it go for under $195,000 - but it must be a competitive offer...

Thanks
Bob

And my response:

BOB -

IMO, WTF? LOL

- BSD (CEO)

Sling has announced their new media portal to compete with Hulu, YouTube and other sites today. And of course when we read news like this, we ask - how will people be able to download or record these video streams?

At-Large Recorder is already working with SlingPlayer 2.0, so that's one option, but I suspect they will use a different technology (Flash?) for their media service. Once we get our beta invite and try it out, we'll let you know what we discover.

As far as the service goes, here's our take. The Clip-and-Sling idea is moronic - I sincerely doubt people will take the time to make clips of TV shows, and also people will be less than likely to watch them. Of course, people DO this already in YouTube, but the effort involved in this acts as a natural filter for presenting interesting things to viewers. if it's too easy to make clips of TV shows, there will be a lot of noise. Also - being tied to the content owners may limit the flexibility of end-users to make compelling clips. We'll have to see how the service evolves.

However - if they can provide LiveTV over the web, I can see that as being a game changer. And with the new SlingCatcher boxes coming out which let your TV become the viewing hardware for any Sling stream, we may finally get true IPTV. This will open the floodgates for other similar services, as nobody wants to be left behind.