CentralNic Group plc (AIM:CNIC), the Internet platform business which derives revenues from the global sale of domain names, has been awarded the exclusive contract with San Francisco-based BRS Media, the rights holder for the Top-Level Domain (“TLD”) .FM, to distribute the .FM domain on CentralNic’s global technical platform.
The .FM TLD has been adopted by numerous high profile names including country music superstar, CarrieUnderwood.fm, the US National Public Radio’s (NPR) podcast channel Earbud.fm, and China’s popular online radio aggregator application Qingting.fm. The .FM TLD also formed an integral part of Last.fm’s branding – one of the music industry’s most disruptive music streaming websites that was acquired by CBS in 2007 for USD$280 million. CentralNic will work with BRS Media to continue to promote .FM amongst the online streaming and music industries, an industry which achieved digital revenues of US$6.7 billion in 2015 (Source: IFPI’s Global Music Report 2016).
CentralNic CEO Ben Crawford said, “.FM and its affiliated domain extensions are good examples of how to succeed as ‘dotIndustry’ domains, with their longstanding adoption by companies who have redefined their industry, such as Last.fm. We are excited to add this group of high quality TLDs and Second-Level Domain extensions (“SLDs”) to CentralNic’s global backend platform.”
BRS Media CEO George Bundy said: “Migrating onto the CentralNic platform gives our TLDs and SLDs immediate access to many more active registrars than we had before, as well as CentralNic’s own global sales and marketing services, which have been proven on other repurposed country code Top-Level Domain (“ccTLDs”) like .pw and .la and by CentralNic’s staggering 34% market share of all new gTLD registrations.”
Other domain extensions under this agreement include .RADIO.fm and .RADIO.am, which are geared towards bootstrap start-ups, small office/home offices, entrepreneurs, one-person streaming companies, as well as traditional radio broadcasters across the globe.
Finally under the same agreement, CentralNic will also launch .AM and the .co.am, .com.am, .net.am and .org.am subdomains through its new disruptive Registry Gateway Service at the end of August 2016. The Registry Gateway Service allows registrars to access multiple extensions from multiple registries through one single EPP (Extensible Provisioning Protocol) connection.
