Silvio Scaglia, the founder of Italian triple-play telecom firm FastWeb, and former CEO of Omnitel (now Vodafone Italy) is launching a new venture, an online video service called Babelgum.
Scaglia has invested about $13.2 million of his own money in Babelgum and is the company’s chairman and sole investor. The service aims to stream full-screen TV-quality videos online using P2P…it will be introduced publicly in a test phase end of the month, with a full release expected by the end of the year.
Babelgum will be ad-supported and is targeting mostly small, independent productions that would have otherwise have trouble getting distributed. The nine channels will feature only professionally produced videos, including movie trailers, short films, news clips from AP, entertainment news, sports and animation.
The content will be in English, a choice Scaglia says is rooted in the fact that Babelgum is aiming to appeal to people from all over the world. The company, founded in mid-2005, is pan-European, with its headquarters in Dublin, a software-development facility in Nice, France, and content-acquisition team in London.