The TRUTH About Thailand's New DTV Visa (youtube.com)
Not by calendar year, but by first day there. You can extend it easily from 180 days to 360 days, and then you have to leave and re-enter Thailand, and you start again when you re-enter. The counter resets itself to day 1 when people enter again.
DTV is targetted at freelancers, DigitalNomads, or for people who attend classes (muy thai, cooking) or courses, or for children of DTV holders. You need a certificate from an external company, or a professional portfolio of your work (doens't require contracts ongoing, but that does help, but really you just need to show the profile), or show you're a child or spouse or whatever of another DTV holder. You can do it online, and then you enter showing the certificate you got online (if you did it not online you would have the visa in your password).
There is a financial requirement, you have to show you have 500k Thai Baht (in any bank). (That's $15k USD.)
Thailand wants workers, they want to encourage classes and courses, and they want to allow family of people already staying in Thailand for good reason. The government wants to cater to different types of people, so they have different visas for different types of people.
They also have a visa that caters to students.
And they extended their 30 day to 60 days, and extended it from just travellers to conferences or whatever.
The official is very polite, does him appropriate honor, and thanks him for what he has done in Thailand and ‘for’ Thailand, even though the guy himself is the direct recipient of his actions. This is how countries and people and governments behave who want to get admiration and respect themselves, and is the opposite of what we seem to get from most of the non-Asia world. If you do something for Thailand that they like or is good for them, it seems, they will be warmer towards you. In another thing here on L&sJ last year, there was another Thai official or scholar who was commenting on how they didn't really care so much about the crime (I think it wasy), but the way the person behaved and how they were, and that was the important thing.
In Asia, there seems to be a long understanding of mutual benefits. Maybe in the Middle East too, so all of the East, maybe. And in the West, it's more begrudging of anyone, and accusatory of any success. Is it that the West immeditately tries to tear down or find fault with anyone who establishes themselves as having any success, and the east sort of just converts them into higher-up people, who are expected to take on the role of patrons with perhaps greater rights?