You’ve heard of the dot-com boom. Is the dot-tv boom next?

On Monday, Amazon said it would pay $1.1 billion for a website that streams people playing video games. The website is called Twitch — but its address is not Twitch.com, but Twitch.tv.

It’s a distinction easily overlooked, but one that highlights an inexorable shift in how people — especially young people — consume video.

Today, as video is watched on smartphones and laptops rather than on living room couches, the .tv suffix — owned, improbably, by the tiny South Pacific island nation of Tuvalu — has become for some companies a chance to signal that they are showing video the way people are increasingly used to seeing it. Last month, 190 million Americans watched online video content, according to comScore.