The folks behind the infamous Pirate Bay site (which tracks BitTorrent feeds worldwide) are apparently getting ready to fire another shot across the bow of the so-called Content Cartel with Video Bay, and experimental site that aims to provide high-definition in-browser via using new features in HTML 5 (like the <video> and <audio> tags) to stream content directly to users without making them wait for massive content to download first. And, in true Pirate Bay fashion, the site doesn’t seem very concerned with only providing access to material that’s being distributed with permission of copyright holders.
As it stands now, the Video Bay site seems purely experimental—warnings on the site warn absolutely nothing may work, and sporadic attempts to access the site have found video content has been accessible only once. The site requires a browser that supports appropriate HTML 5 tags (which omits Internet Explorer, but includes current versions of Firefox, Safari, Opera, and Chrome), and the Pirate Bay warns that the site is “subjected to both live and drunk (en)coding, so please don’t bug us too much if the site ain’t working properly.”
The four Pirate Bay operators—Peter Sunde, Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm and Carl Lundström—were recently denied a retrial after having been sentenced to a year in jail and over $3 million in fines in a Swedish court. They are appealing the judgement. The Pirate Bay founders had been hinting for years that they were thinking of launching a video site to compete with the likes of YouTube; the project was thought to have been scuttled, but now The Video Bay service appears to be getting underway.
There’s little doubt Video Bay will run afoul of movie and television studios as well as the MPAA for copyright infringement and unauthorized distribution—and, given that the Pirate Bay has (for the moment) already been convicted on similar charges, the legal future of Video Bay appears grim at first glance. But it the service can take off and offer a simple in-browser video solution that doesn’t require lengthy downloads, complicated encoding/re-encoding, or that users mess with disc images and other technical legerdemain, Video Bay may change the face of online video offerings, regardless of how long it can stay afloat.
