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With the introduction of Joost, the focus on professionally created content has all went to them. Now, before the market gets away from them, a new contender in the "professional" space is emerging called Babelgum.

To get the name out there and familiar to people, founder Silvio Scaglia, an Italian billionaire, has enlisted Spike Lee to air a short film on the online network called "Jesus Children of America, which will be exclusive to Babelgum."

CEO Erik Lumer said that they will have some advantages over other startups in that they will use a video player with peer -to-peer file-sharing technology like BitTorrent uses. That makes the video stream of a higher quality and faster as well. While that would be an advantage over YouTube, it wouldn't be over Joost. Joost offers a higher quality stream also.

The one thing that Lumer mentions that probably will be a huge advantage will be founder Scaglia himself. He is said to be absolutely committed to making Babelgum a big player on the Internet video stage.

Scaglia is in the midst of selling his telecom company Fastweb - in Italy - so that he will be able to focus on his new venture.

What's important there is that the company won't be working to do a lot of short-term strategies to satisfy venture capitalists or angel investors.

The company has plans to monetize the site with ads, but in the beginning they'll offer videos without any interruptions to build scale, and once it reaches around a couple of million users, they will at that time get in contact with marketers.

Joost does have a big headstart on Bablegum in signing deals with large media companies like Time Warner (TWX), CBS (CBS-A), Sony (SNE) and Viacom (VIA-B). Still, along with Spike Lee, the company has developed partnerships with Reuters and the Associated Press for video clips of their content. They are also in the process of building up a video library of classic black and whites, animated clips, sports videos and documentaries.

The company is currently in beta and has between 1,000 and 2,000 hours of video for when the company emerges out of testing and the public can sample their product. They are working hard to get over 10,000 hours of content as quickly as they can.

While the videos on the site will be free for viewers, when the advertising begins, they will split revenue with the content owners on a 50-50 basis.