Buy your .stream domain today

A .stream domain is built for anything delivered as video or audio over the internet, live or on demand. The word covers a broadcaster putting a channel online, a podcast or radio show with a home page, a conference or gig streamed to ticket holders, and a platform whose product is the delivery itself.

It also works as a short address for a single show rather than a whole company, which is a tidy way to give a series its own identity without building a separate brand. That matters if you are choosing a domain for one program, because the extension already says what the page is and the name in front of it can just be the title.

No, .stream is restricted to nobody. There is no eligibility requirement, no broadcast license test and no check on what you intend to publish, and the extension is sold worldwide through ordinary registrars.

The registry does hold an acceptable use policy letting it act against names used for malware, phishing or copyright infringement, which is a condition on conduct rather than on who you are. For anyone running a legitimate channel that is a protection rather than an obstacle.

Yes, a .stream domain fits audio as naturally as video, and a podcast or station is one of the better uses for it. The word describes how the audience receives the thing rather than which medium it is, so it reads correctly for a live radio feed, an episode archive or a subscriber-only show.

One practical note if you go this way. Podcast listings, show notes and player apps will all carry the address, so pick something short enough to survive being read aloud at the end of an episode and typed from memory afterwards.

Yes, and for many broadcasters that is the sensible arrangement. Your main site keeps the company information, the archive and the commercial pages, and the .stream address does one job, which is sending people straight to the live or on-demand player.

That split is easy to run and easy to promote, because a short address is what you want on screen, in a chat message or in a social bio. Keep the renewal on automatic payment, since a channel address that stops working takes every posted link with it.

Yes, and the difference is in the obligations rather than in anything a visitor sees. ICANN designated .video and .media as strings in a regulated sector and attached a set of safeguards to them, and .stream was never given that designation, so it carries none of them.

Commercially the three overlap heavily, and .live competes for the same ground with a broader meaning. .stream is the most specific of the four about the delivery method, which is its real advantage, while .video and .media read more like categories of content and .live is the one to compare on availability if your first choice is gone. So pick .stream when the delivery method is the thing you want named, and check .live first if availability rather than precision is your constraint.

Mail from a .stream domain reaches inboxes normally when the domain is set up properly, because the filters that matter look at authentication and sending history rather than at the extension alone. Publishing the right records and sending consistently from the same domain is what determines where your mail lands.

The one thing worth doing on a newer extension is warming it up gently rather than firing off a large campaign from a cold domain on day one. If your mailing list is the core of the business, many broadcasters keep sending from an established domain and use the .stream address for the public channel page.

More than ICANN asked of it, which is the genuinely interesting fact about this extension. The operator wrote its own abuse prevention plan into the contract, including a single published point of contact and an acceptable use policy letting it lock, cancel or transfer a name used for malware, phishing, piracy or trademark and copyright infringement.

The contract also records a commitment to give serious consideration to policy recommendations drafted for entertainment extensions that depend on copyright protection. Put plainly, copyright pressure on this extension was anticipated when it launched and the registry holds the power to act on it.

For you as a registrant that is a real counterparty consideration. A legitimate channel has nothing to fear from it, but the registry can act on a name on its own initiative, so it is worth knowing the address sits under a stronger policy than most extensions carry.

A .stream domain does not appear in the current annual phishing study, and it is on no abuse ranking we could find. What belongs alongside that is the size point: the extension is small, and several abuse studies only rank extensions above a volume threshold, so absence from a list is not the same as a clean result.

The more useful thing to know is what the public signal around the extension looks like. Unauthorized streaming and IPTV sites are the most visible thing running on it, which describes the neighborhood rather than the odds that one properly configured site gets filtered.

So decide how much that matters for your case. If your audience arrives through links you control, from a player, a listing or a social profile, it matters little. If you depend on cold outreach or on newsletter delivery to strangers, sending from an established domain and keeping .stream for the channel page is the safer arrangement.