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Amazingly, .blockbuster will soon be a gTLD

Kevin Murphy, June 3, 2016, 11:22:58 (UTC), Domain Registries

Video rental chain Blockbuster may have gone the way of the the 8-track, the VCR, and the Nokia cell phone, but it will soon have a gTLD of its own.
The .blockbuster gTLD application completed its pre-delegation testing with ICANN this week and is now with IANA/Verisign, ready to go live on the internet in the coming week or so.
It’s a fairly straightforward dot-brand application, even though the brand itself is pretty much dead.
Blockbuster, which at its peak in 2004 had 9,000 rental stores in its chain, was rescued from its Netflix-induced bankruptcy by TV company Dish Network back in 2011.
Dish applied for .blockbuster in 2012 when the brand was still, if only barely, a going concern.
However, since that time all of its remaining Blockbuster stores have been closed down and the Blockbuster-branded streaming service has been renamed Sling.
The web site at blockbuster.com is a husk that hasn’t been updated since 2014.
And yet the brand will shortly be at the cutting edge of online branding by having its own new gTLD.
A dot-brand without a brand? Surely this will be among the most useless new gTLDs to hit the ‘net.



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Comments (2)

  1. Reg says:

    Maybe the next Netflix killer?

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