Babelgum’s New CEO and New Plans
The Internet TV service Babelgum announced the appointment of new CEO Valerio Zingarelli earlier today on their blog. Zingarelli, a former CTO of Italian mobile network provider Omnitel now part of Vodafone, will take over for co-founder Erik Lumer. This change marks Babelgum’s transition from building out their technical capabilities to focusing on content acquisition, gaining viewers and eventual making some money via advertising.
Zingarelli had the following to say about his appointment:
“Babelgum is right at the heart of a revolution in television, building a truly personal global media capable of delivering a huge amount of professional television quality content to millions of users around the world. It’s a new kind of distribution that is uniquely suited to satisfying individual passions and interests through the innovative Smart Channels concept, i.e. channels defined individually by users”.
The most interesting part of the announcement is independent content producers will soon be able to submit their videos for inclusion into Babelgum. At this point there doesn’t appear to be a large motivation for users to upload videos though. During the Joost vs. Babelgum comparison it was obvious that social features were strangely absent so community recognition isn’t a major factor. Users will be required to upload the content so Babelgum won’t be automatically pulling from other media sites as VeohTV does. I’ve also heard nothing about revenue sharing like Revver so there doesn’t appear to be a financial incentive either. The platform and interface is quite nice, so I hope they’re able to keep up their recent string of content deals and hopefully add some bigger fish.
Oh, and with plans to increase headcount to 100 employees by year end I’m sure that Dublin-based Babelgum is hiring.
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