Babelgum

» see babelgum.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

babelgum sat in the part of internet history i can read about but cannot personally remember. it launched in 2007 as the italian peer-to-peer internet tv platform funded by silvio scaglia, co-founder of fastweb, and aimed at the same audience as joost. the laptop-and-broadband crowd watching long-form video in a windowed player instead of a tv. in 2007 i was on ttnet adsl in ankara, twenty-three, and the long-form video i was watching was already on youtube. p2p tv clients had a brief window to land before youtube and flash made them unnecessary, and babelgum's window was about two years.

the founding pitch was real. scaglia and the physicist erik lumer started the project in 2005 and put around fifty million euros into the build. the proprietary peer-to-peer stack used h.264 compression and a custom client app that ran on windows desktops and on the smartphones of the era. content partnerships landed with major broadcasters including the bbc and national geographic. the babelgum online film festival ran from 2007 with a jury chaired by spike lee. it looked like a credible top-tier internet tv launch.

march 2009 the company killed the p2p stack and switched to a flash-based browser player. that was a tacit admission that the client-install model was not pulling users. by november 2009 the offices in nice and dublin closed and operations consolidated in london and milan. by 2012 the platform was in liquidation.

~ the case file ~

~ what it tried ~

the p2p video idea was not stupid. through the mid-2000s the assumption was that video would have to be peer-distributed because central servers could not afford the bandwidth. bittorrent had proved the model for downloads. joost and the akamai-backed competitors all built clients on the assumption that p2p was how internet tv would scale. that bet lost. by 2009 youtube and flash had figured out that a centralized cdn was cheaper at scale than getting every user to install a custom app.

babelgum's 2009 pivot to flash was a year too late and went to a platform that itself had three years left before mobile killed it. the spike lee film festival kept running through 2010 as the most visible brand asset. add-on prizes like the 2009 metropolis art award filled out the calendar. none of that converted into a viewership story that could sustain the burn rate.

~ the funny part ~

the funny part is what killed it was not the platform losing. on 24 february 2010 italian prosecutors in rome issued an arrest warrant for silvio scaglia as part of operation phuncards-broker, a probe into vat carousel fraud at fastweb and telecom italia sparkle dating back to 2003-2006. the allegation pinned roughly two billion euros of fraudulent refunds across 56 individuals on a network of phony international voice traffic. scaglia denied involvement and was eventually fully acquitted in 2013. but the years he spent fighting the case offline were exactly the years babelgum needed an active funder.

the platform went quiet through 2010 and 2011 and entered liquidation in 2012. the wikipedia entry says only that the platform was shuttered after scaglia's legal issues interrupted operations. that is the cleanest summary you can write. the founder got pulled away from the project for an unrelated criminal investigation, the platform's sole funder stopped funding, and the lights went off.

~ what carried over ~

babelgum's residue is mostly in the festival side. the film festival jurors from the spike lee era went back to other careers. the proprietary p2p stack went nowhere. joost killed its own client in 2008 and pivoted to a web player. the whole client-install category quietly died with it.

what babelgum actually showed was how thin the second-tier p2p tv category was. there was room for one credible client-side platform per geography, maybe. joost took the press attention, and youtube took everything else. babelgum had the money and the celebrity jurors and a real engineering team, and it still ran out of runway in five years.

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