Hard on the heels of Joost comes Babelgum with a very similar offering - a peer-to-peer, ad-supported, streaming Internet TV service featuring commercial rather than user-generated content. Oh, yes, and the founders are Europeans (one of them, Silvio Scaglia, is chief of Fastweb, an Italian broadband telecom company) and the product's name sounds more like a snack food than an entertainment service.

Babelgum opened its beta site today, and while the company warns that this is a "true beta" and glitches are to be expected, the product seems quite clean. The user interface is intuitive and non-intrusive, and I encountered a minimum of the video stuttering that I found to be such a problem with Joost. Unlike Joost, the picture size isn't infinitely adjustable - there are full-screen and window modes, with two sizes for each - but on the other hand the video quality was so good that I didn't feel tempted to play with the screen size. And that's because Babelgum is serious about quality - they require content providers to supply high-resolution files so that users can view videos on full screen.

The quality of the videos themselves (I'm talking about content now, rather than viewing quality) is surprisingly high. The offerings, though limited, include music, news, travelogues, cartoons, documentaries and short features. Like Joost, Babelgum says it expects to line up a large selection of commercial content from both major producers and independents.

The system for finding content needs a little tweaking. There are nine ready-made channels in the channel directory, (though only three of them appear in the menu bar when you first install the software) but they don't include all the content you would think they should. For example, the music channel only seems to contain seven videos, but there's actually lots more music available if you search for it.

You can create custom channels based on tags -- a very nice feature -- but of course the tags are only as good as the people who tagged them. Right now there's nothing tagged with Spike Lee, for example, even though he is represented on the Fiction channel by a short feature. So until there are more users doing more tagging, finding what you want to watch won't be easy.

All in all, Babelgum seems like a strong contender and yet another reason to expect bandwidth demand to keep skyrocketing.