One of the most popular sports streaming sites online is First Row Sports, but First Row was not always the name and it was not always on a .eu domain. The site itself has remained very consistent but it has taken a path to end up where it is today. Millions of people online are able to watch live sports through First Row Sports but not many of them are aware of the journey that has been taken to bring them those sports links that they have come to know and love.
The original site began as P2P4U.net. The site was very simple from a web design perspective, it offered a common template and you could choose between the different sports to see which streams were listed. P2P4U grew in popularity starting in the UK and most especially among soccer fans. Those european football fans came to P2P4U in droves as they wanted to watch games from all over the world, from major league soccer in the United States to the European League in Europe to many other football leagues.
As their popularity started to grow so did other things. The site moved up in the search engines to be near the top when people searched for where they could watch live sports online. As a result of this their fame and notoriety grew and eventually it landed them within the scope of the US government. Two years ago before the Superbowl the US government went after many of the famous sports streaming sites and sports linking sites and P2P4U was among them. The US Government had the ability to confiscate domain names that fell under any domain extension that was run by the US company Verisign. P2P4U was under the .net registry which was run by Verisign and so the domain name was lost.
Not to be deterred, the founders came back as First Row Sports but a little while later the same thing happened and FirstRowSports.com was taken by the US Government. This is when many of the sports streaming and linking sites decided that it was better to put their sites on a domain extension out of the grasp of the US. While extensions like .tv, .eu, or .es are not as common and popular worldwide and recognized by people, the ability to start building a brand that could not be taken outweighed risking losing your domain name to the US government and sites started to move to these lesser known domain extensions. Sites like FirstRowSports, ATDHE, and Rojadirecta all moved and MyP2P moved and rebranded itself as Wiziwig.
The biggest challenge that these sites faced in moving to these extensions is to have people give their trust, as most people do not visit anything other than .com domains. There have also been sites that popped up using the same templates as the real sites but not run by the same people. Some of these sites are harmless and some of them may cause harm to your computer.
