For an Italian billionaire many times over, Silvio Scaglia seems and sounds very humble. He says he’s merely the engineer, but of course that only a partial picture of his creds: He recently sold (still in the clearance process) his pioneering triple-play company Fastweb to Swissscom for close to $5 billion. Before founding Fastweb in 1999, Scaglia was CEO of Italian operator Omnitel, now Vodafone Italy.

His new venture is Babelgum, a full-screen, high-res online video service which will always be compared to Joost, even though the two started around the same time, though Joost has a headstart and much more content on it for now. But he says he is patient, and in it for the long haul, much like his other two companies. He is investing a big chunk of his personal money, as an indication of his commitment to this, and that’s the only money he is taking for now, he says.

The company just announced about 30 content partnerships, it first major ones, including, Reuters, ITN and BBC MotionGallery, and sports content from Fight Network and Black Diamond. The site for now focuses on independent film through deals with the Soho Film Festival, the Rushes Short Film Festival and Spike Lee, who has contributed documentaries and short films to the service.

Scaglia is in town for Digital Hollywood (the company is based in Ireland), and I spoke to him over coffee at the Four Seasons in Beverly Hills yesterday. A wide ranging interview on his views on online video space; the IPTV market in Europe and how he views IPTV efforts from AT&T and Verizon here; IPTV versus online TV; difference between Babelgum and Joost; his view on how content players are easing up on distributing content; the technology for high-red video online as it stands now; and others topics.

Stream the audio below, or you can download the MP3 of the interview here (25 mins, 10 MB).

Our Digital Hollywood coverage is sponsored by PaymentOne’s 2007 Digital Media Payments Report