Far too often conceited and vainglorious people at the top of companies ignore the most basic rule of commerce - never pick a fight with competitors you cannot beat.

Setanta Media is different. Its directors Mr Leonard Ryan and Mr Michael O'Rourke acknowledge they have been successful buying up rights to lucrative "properties" like the Premier League and North American baseball and basketball, but they are careful not to mix it with giants like Sky, Fox and ESPN.

"We don't see ourselves as a threat to Sky. We would operate on the periphery and try to pick up rights they are not really interested in. We pick fights we can win. We are never going to beat News Corp for example," says Mr Ryan.

The company does its business very much out of the public spotlight and Messers Ryan and O'Rourke are reluctant interviewees. However, with Setanta planning to bring in new shareholders, both men will have to cope with more media scrutiny.

Mr O'Rourke explains the company's history and strategy succinctly "We've grown organically to date and we've done it from a very small capital base and we're operating in an extremely competitive environment with Sky or Fox and we've managed to skirt around the periphery of these type of companies and build a business."

They both point out that rights owners - sports bodies in most cases - are happy to have smaller upstarts like Setanta around. "The right holders or the federations, they like to have other people in the mix and they'll always try to sell you some rights just so they keep a bit of competition in the market," says Mr O'Rourke.

Setanta is not a single company. According to returns at the Companies Office, it is 17 separate companies. This reflects the wide range of media and sports-related activities the company is involved in. The two directors, who own more than 80 per cent of the equity, deny it is too broadly based. With the exception of their investment in the Web-based business, Servecast, it is all about sport, says Mr Ryan.

The company's beginnings go back to that crazy summer 13 years ago when Ireland added a dash of green colour to Italia '90. The two men were working in London during that period and discovered that Irish fans could not access the games.

"We hired the Irish club in Eaton Square and we were charging people a fiver to watch the Irish games. We had screens in all the rooms and about 500 or 600 came to watch it. For the Ireland Holland game, ITV and BBC did not show the game. So we made a few phone calls and we managed to plamás access to the rights for nothing. We had to take it off a European Broadcasting Union \ feed and we paid a lot of money to do that," recalls Mr Ryan.

"Then we linked it into a venue in north fields, near Acton, in a place called the Top Hat. We probably got about 1,000 people to show up just by word of mouth. We lost money on it. But it was then we realised there was a group of displaced ex-pats living in England who obviously wanted to see this game and maybe there is more to it."

This simple idea is what drives Setanta today. There are thousands of displaced sport fans worldwide desperately trying to access their favourite sports. Setanta has stepped into the gap and given them what they want. In the years following the World Cup, Ireland's qualification games were added, then GAA games and rugby.

But getting rights in the United States could be even more lucrative. The company acquired the rights to show the English Premier League matches in the US, where the ex-pat population is large and sports obsessed. The US remains the company's focus to this day, with 75 per cent of its revenue coming from TV offerings on the other side of the Atlantic.

But Mr Ryan says Setanta is still seen by some people as a small business based in the sports halls and bars of London and Boston. "A lot of people have this perception of Setanta that it's just a bunch of bars in England and America with people queuing up with dirty fivers paying for GAA matches, but we are a long long way from that."

For example, the company has been awarded a sports channel on the Freeview platform in Britain; it also owns the North American Sports Network (NASN), an all-American sports channel available to exiled Americans; it is available on Sky Digital in Ireland and Britain; it has a stake in NewsTalk 106; the company makes television programme, like Breaking Ball for RTÉ; it also publishes the magazine of the same name; and the company also provides material for mobile phones.

Lots of activity, but is it profitable? Mr Ryan is shy about the company's overall profitability, simply saying that it will produce €22 million turnover this year, although this does not include NASN, the American sports channel. To go to the next level, the two admit that more capital will be needed, not to mention more directors and new shareholders.

However, despite the changes in Dublin, the company's link with NewsTalk 106 has attracted the lion's share of media coverage. Are they worried about its failure to pull in a big audience?

Mr Ryan is not prepared to run for financial cover yet: "Obviously as a shareholder you would be worried about the listenership figures, although I don't think that the last JNLRs did the station justice. Because if you were to read them it would say our listenership hadn't moved from the previous one, but we know anecdotally from the number of texts and phone calls we're getting, and just from our own internal research, it is just not representative and I don't know why its not representative."

He says success will not come easy for the station. "The other thing is that the target market we are going after, which would primarily be RTÉ One radio listeners, is a very hard audience to attract because the product they have is good. And it is very ambitious. It's going to take a long time to get there. But we're still in there."

But what of Setanta's future? "It's a very interesting time for us because the last three years the markets have been very depressed in terms of raising money to do anything new. And media is kind of on its way back again, so if we position ourselves correctly over the next three or four years, it could get very interesting."