Italian media and telecommunications entrepreneur Silvio Scaglia is to locate the global headquarters of a new internet television broadcasting service, Babelgum, in Dublin.
The company plans to create 100 new media jobs this year followed by further investments "in the tens of millions of euros" if the internet television market performs as expected.
Mr Scaglia, who ranks 746th in the Forbes list of billionaires, was formerly chief executive officer at Omnitel, now Vodafone Italy, and owns Fastweb, the only internet service in the world running the highest-speed fibre optic cables into customers' homes.
Erik Lumer, Babelgum's chief executive, said the group had chosen to set up in Dublin because of the availability of skilled technical people and also because of the city's track record of building high-tech organisations quickly.
He also said the initial focus of the group is expected to be English language programming, so language is important. The low level of corporate tax also played a role, but "not such an important one," added.
Mr Lumer also noted Dublin's success in ramping up operations for Google and Yahoo as key factors in the decision.
"We are already recruiting in Dublin," he said. "Not through press adverts yet, but through online sites and agencies. We expect to be up to a hundred people by year end and after that we expect to make similar investments that Yahoo and Google have in Dublin."
He believes Babelgum will help build critical mass in new media enterprises in Ireland.
Internet television is already available, but existing services such as YouTube, Akimbo and Narrowstep, suffer from poor quality because of the cheap recording equipment used by participants and the bottlenecks in the web. Services with the technology to deliver TV standard programming over the internet are very few indeed.
The market for true internet television is difficult to quantify but eMarketer, specialists in online advertising spend, anticipate annual expenditure will reach $3 billion (€2.3 billion) by 2010.
One of the main barriers to growth in the sector is the long trail of video and picture rights that lie behind many films and videos. Most TV companies buy archive and picture rights for broadcast only and aren't able to sell their programming to internet stations like Babelgum without the costly business of renegotiating rights.
To get round that Babelgum is focusing on encouraging independent producers to supply programming to its new service. This is a strategy that could pay dividends for Ireland's independent production sector if it can negotiate with RTÉ the right to sell productions originally commissioned by the State broadcaster.
Irish technical staff would also be expected to play a role in developing new ways for viewers to find and share video programming on the web. Babelgum is currently developing new search and programme-sharing technologies.
