.live Domain
Broadcast, Stream, and Perform
Register your .live domain from just £29.99/yr. Free DNS management, email forwarding, and 10GB mailbox included with every domain.
What is a .live domain?
The .live domain signals real-time content and experiences. Live streamers, event broadcasters, concert promoters, and webinar platforms all benefit from a domain that tells visitors something is happening right now. It carries energy and immediacy that most extensions lack.
Who should register .live?
Live streamers, concert promoters, webinar platforms, and event broadcasters.
Why choose .live?
- Signals real-time content
- Carries energy and immediacy
- Growing with the live streaming boom
- Four letters, maximum impact
Who runs .live, and since when
Registry data from the .live delegation record held by IANA, which maintains the internet's root zone. Eligibility comes from the registry's own policy, and the prices are ours.
- Extension type
- Generic (gTLD)
- Registry operator
- Dog Beach, LLC
- The organisation that runs the extension
- In the root zone since
- 2015
- Delegated 25 June 2015
- Who can register
- Open to anyone worldwide, with no sector, licence or local presence requirement
- Checked against the registry's own policy
- Our price
- £29.99 a year
- Ex VAT. Renews at the same price
Why a .live domain has to earn its ending
Read the whole address out loud before you buy one. That single test decides more .live registrations than anything else on this page. A keyword ending is not a neutral suffix the way .com is; it is the last word of the name, and it either finishes a phrase or it sits there making a claim the site does not keep. thefestival.live works. bradleyplumbing.live does not, and no amount of design will fix it.
Where it does work, it works well. Venues, one-off and annual events, church services, comedy nights, conference streams, a band with a regular broadcast, the streaming half of a brand whose main site lives elsewhere. In each of those the ending does the job a tagline would otherwise have to do, and the address survives being read out from a stage.
The extension came through ICANN's New gTLD Program. The registry agreement was signed on 4 December 2014, and IANA's delegation report of 6 July 2015 records the domain going to United TLD Holdco, Ltd. of Dublin. It moved again on 2 June 2021, when IANA's transfer report put the root zone record in the name of Dog Beach, LLC, with Identity Digital listed as the technical contact. Two operators in ten years sounds unsettling and is not: the ICANN agreement runs with the string rather than the company, on a ten-year term that renews for successive ten-year periods, and a registrant notices nothing.
Price is where to pay attention. The base agreement .live runs under sets no maximum at all on what the registry may charge. What it gives you instead is 180 days' notice before a renewal rise and the right to renew for up to ten years at the old price first. Separately, the registry reserves a set of names it treats as premium, and a premium name carries its higher price at every renewal rather than only in year one. Check the renewal figure, not just the first-year one.
A practical note from hosting these sites. A .live address almost never serves the video itself: the page comes off your hosting, and the stream comes from YouTube, Twitch, Vimeo or a dedicated provider and is embedded. Plan the DNS a day or two ahead of an event and drop your record TTLs first, so a last-minute change propagates in minutes instead of hours.
Is .live the right choice for you?
We would rather sell you the right extension once than the wrong one twice.
.live works well if
- The word finishes the name. Read the whole address aloud and it forms a phrase a stranger could repeat back without spelling it.
- You need a memorable address for an event or a season, and would rather not bolt a year onto a .co.uk you will abandon.
- You already broadcast on a platform and want one address of your own, with the embed, the schedule and the archive on a page you control.
- You are building the streaming side of an existing brand and want it kept separate from the main trading site.
Look elsewhere if
- It is your only address and your customers are UK consumers. Google reads a .co.uk as a UK signal; .live carries no country at all.
- You will read the address out on the phone or print it on a van. People hear an unfamiliar ending and type .com anyway.
- You want a predictable renewal. There is no ceiling on the .live wholesale price, and a name the registry flags as premium costs the premium every year.
- Nothing about the business is live. The ending then promises something the site cannot deliver, which does more damage than a neutral one.
Is this the permanent home of a UK business rather than an event? Register the .co.uk as your address and point the .live at it. See .co.uk pricing.
.live vs .co.uk: which should you register?
These two are not competing for the same job, which is what makes the comparison worth making. A .co.uk is a location. A .live is a description. Choosing between them means deciding whether the address needs to say where you are or what you do.
.co.uk wins on defaults. It is what a British visitor expects and what they type if they half-remember your name. Google reads it as a UK signal, transfers are near instant because they are an IPS tag change at Nominet, WHOIS privacy is free for UK individual registrants, and it is much the cheaper of the two.
.live wins on the read. If the point of the site is that something happens at a particular time, the ending says so in one word and a .co.uk cannot. Buy the .co.uk as the permanent home and the .live for the poster.
| .live | .co.uk | |
|---|---|---|
| Type | Generic top-level domain | Second level of the .uk country code |
| Google geotargeting | No country signal | UK signal |
| Registry | Dog Beach, LLC | Nominet |
| In use since | 2015 | 1985 |
| WHOIS privacy | Paid add-on | Free for UK individuals |
| Transfer time | Hours to a few days | Near instant, via the IPS tag |
.live domain questions, answered
What people ask us before registering a .live domain.
Can't find what you're looking for?
Ask us directlyIt is neutral. Google has stated that keywords in a top-level domain give no advantage or disadvantage in search, and its current documentation treats every generic extension the same way. The real difference is geographic: a country-code extension such as .co.uk tells Google the site is aimed at the UK, and .live tells it nothing. If your customers search from Britain, that is a point against it.
Anyone, anywhere. There is no broadcasting licence to hold, no sector to belong to, no local presence requirement and nothing to prove at the point of order. You do not have to stream anything either, though a site that never does wastes the one thing the ending gives you. The registry can suspend a domain used for malware, phishing or spam, which is a condition on behaviour rather than eligibility.
The domain is an address, not a streaming service, and shared hosting is the wrong place to serve live video from. In practice a .live site is a page on ordinary hosting with a player embedded in it, and the video comes from YouTube, Twitch, Vimeo or a specialist provider. That is how nearly every streaming site works, so budget for the streaming platform separately.
Some will, and it is better to plan for it than hope. A reader who half-remembers a name reaches for the ending they know, which for most of the public is still .com or .co.uk. If the matching name is free on one of those, registering it and redirecting costs little and catches traffic you would otherwise lose. If not, always write the address in full.
Two things cause it. Many registrars discount the first year of a newer extension and renew at the standard rate, so the second invoice is the real price. Separately, the registry reserves names it treats as premium, and those carry the higher price at every renewal rather than only at registration. There is also no cap on .live: the base agreement sets a notice period but no maximum.
Dog Beach, LLC holds the delegation, with Identity Digital operating the infrastructure. It was delegated in 2015 to United TLD Holdco, Ltd. of Dublin, and IANA moved the root zone record to Dog Beach on 2 June 2021. The agreement with ICANN was signed on 4 December 2014 for a ten-year term that renews. A change of operator leaves your domain and nameservers alone.
Included with Your .live Domain
DNS Management
Full DNS zone editor to manage A, CNAME, MX, TXT, and all record types.
Email Forwarding
Set up professional email addresses and forward to any inbox.
Auto-Renewal
Never lose your domain with automatic renewal protection.
Free 10GB Mailbox
One 10GB mailbox (POP3/IMAP) included with every domain, on any TLD.
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Register your .live domain today
Secure your .live domain from just £29.99/yr. Free DNS management, email forwarding, and 10GB mailbox included.
