Forget Louis Walsh, forget Simon Cowell and forget Twink. There's a new talent panel in town and on the panel are people from Australia, France, Britain and Ireland: this new panel is Eircom. Yes folks, Eircom can now help you become a music or TV star with new services it is launching which will bring your music and videos to the population of Ireland and beyond.

It seems timely that with all the talk of Radiohead, Prince and Nine Inch Nails giving away their music, that Eircom has decided to get into the content business as an aggregator and purveyor of local and international talent. Via a soonto-launch music store, Eircom will bring you all the usual music you can get from the likes of iTunes but, more importantly, it will also offer local talent from independent Irish labels and even unsigned talent via a deal with the Downloadmusic. ie music service.

On the TV side, Eircom will roll out a TV over broadband offering next year in areas that can handle higher-speed broadband. This service will provide TV channels and video on demand to its customers, who are already apparently making good use of the Eircom deal with Setanta Sports to watch TV content over broadband. Like the music store, Eircom is actively knocking on doors looking for international and local content to build a large library of TV channels and videos before it launches.

This isn't the first time Eircom has gone into the digital content business.

Back in the dotcom boom, Eircom invested in Rondomondo, Ebeon and Nua, names the current Eircom would rather forget. The foray was a disaster but this time, instead of creating content inhouse, Eircom is merely acting as a retailer.

If we were living in a broadband utopia such as South Korea or the Netherlands, then TV and video over a broadband connection would be easy. However this is Ireland and the basic broadband packages will need serious speed increases to cater for this. Eircom has plans in place to upgrade some Eircom exchanges to ADSL2+ as well as laying fibre to estates or even direct to some houses.

While rolling out fibre to urban Dublin will be easy enough, getting fibre to estates in the rest of Ireland will cost a lot of money and take a lot of time, if it ever happens, and as ADSL2+ is a phoneline technology, the copper needs to be of a high standard outside Dublin, which experience has shown it is not. We might just see people complain of a new digital divide before the existing one is fixed.

With growing competition in the telecoms market, the move into revenue generation via reselling TV and music has to happen to increase or maintain profit margins. However, it seems Eircom's own past is now haunting it by preventing the company from offering this service to each and every one of its customers and not just those in areas where the telecoms infrastructure can handle faster broadband speeds . . . areas in which there is already strong competition from NTL.

Eircom, 100% coverage or not, is sending a clear and positive message that there is now a business model for content distribution online and it might inspire other ISPs and technology companies to do deals with musicians and video producers, giving us access to even more local talent. Judging by the TV shows, though, there's an awful lot of coal to sift before finding that diamond.