Simply put, what is Babelgum, and how was it born? The Babelgum network features content spanning film, news, sports, documentaries, music videos and concerts, lifestyle and trends, animation and scripted programs. Babelgum is the brainchild of Silvio Scaglia, founder and former CEO of Italian telecommunications company Fastweb, the first company to commercially implement IPTV on a ‘closed network’ in Europe. Silvio saw the potential to extend the flexibility, capacity and interactivity of IPTV to the open Internet and formed Babelgum in 2005 to realize that dream. Are the comparisons with Joost justified – how are the two similar – and how do they differ? Both Babelgum and Joost use the same basic peer to peer (P2P) streaming technology to deliver TV quality video and audio over the Internet and both require users to download a small ‘client’ application to view the available library of content. To that extent they are similar.