Rising star Phil Morrow
What's so special? A successful TV production firm is diversifying into online content and pushing the boundaries

Phil Morrow, managing director of Belfast-based TV production firm Wild Rover Productions, says he's got a good team to help him build his new, niche social networking site—Constantcomedy.com. "They live half their lives on the internet, watching and doing things for fun and work. And we already have a good background in interactive technology and comedy," he says.

Morrow set up Wild Rover in 1999 and last year it turned over £2.5m. Constantcomedy will enable comedians to post sketches of themselves that their peers or other users can rate. So why move onto the Web? "Now that the Web has come of age and we are able to stream video properly, it's a new frontier," he explains. "A modern media company needs to be beginning to explore that space."

Morrow's ambitions for now are modest. "Anything that is occupying new commercial territory has the capacity to create a goldrush," he says. "We know that in goldrushes, not everyone gets rich. [This service] is good for our relationship with new artists and comics and for R&D. The real income stream is quite some distance from here—we're still on the nursery slopes."

But he has high hopes: "We haven't scratched the surface of comedy on the internet—it's not a habit that people are in, yet. But the initial signs are encouraging and have way exceeded our expectations. Hopefully, as a standalone business in its own right, it will do very well for us."