Babelgum builds out its content
Babelgum, a company quickly adding independent content for its Internet TV service has added an area to their site highlighting some of their new offerings. Getting the premium treatment is “GONG” a network devoted to anime. Babelgum is certainly ambitious in their aim to “transform a thriving niche business to a mass-market.” The featured lineup is the lesser-known series Gun Frontier and Cosmo Warriors with Ikki Tousen to come in September. None of these are blockbuster offerings but they will help Babelgum fulfill it’s niche status. The deal with GONG isn’t exclusive to Babelgum as Internet TV competitor Joost is also a content partner.
Japanese animation aimed at the 15-30 year old crowd isn’t the only content that’s being featured. Babelgum will be offering a good bit of coverage to independent film festivals. The Italy-based Giffoni Film Festival, going on this week, will be the first they feature with a bit of content from last years festival, but more importantly they’ll be showing some of this years content simultaneously. The video targets an even younger demographic than GONG’s anime since Giffoni has content for teens and younger and is judged by their target audience. Ultimately there will be 8 short films from last year, 4 from this year and 29 long-form trailers. You can go and vote right now on your favorites via Babelgum’s voting feature. The highest rated video will be given an award on Saturday at Giffoni. This is an excellent step forward in user interaction and it’s something that Babelgum needs to improve upon by unlocking more social features. They’re even giving back to their users by awarding VIP passes for the Rushes Soho Shorts Festival Awards. Keep it up!
The last featured area is one that gave Babelgum it’s initial buzz: The partnership with Knicks-loving Spike Lee. Unfortunately there’s not a lot of information on Babelgum’s website about Spike’s contributions. For now there’s a blurb of info regarding the short film Jesus Children of America. If Babelgum’s popularity increases I’m sure we’ll see more independent films from well known directors appear. Internet TV is a phenomenon that is comfortably TV-like, yet inexpensive so it may be alluring for others to release documentaries or pet-project films without worrying about wide distribution costs.
It seems that Babelgum is turning out new content deals every day. None my be mindblowingly spectacular but that isn’t their way. I look forward to more announcements. One area that I hope they address is in the Science or History areas. I know there are a lot of people out there hooked on Discovery and the History Channel and there’s a lot of good stuff out there that should be easily available.
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