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Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum!  Ye makers of The Pirate Bay are apparently not planning to go sailing into waters unknown even amidst all the current legal fiascos they are facing.  They are launching a new site called The Video Bay to be in competition with YouTube.  No one ever said pirates were the meek sort.

Now, this little venture was apparently first started quite some time ago.  As in, two years ago, but it seems they have decided to finally forge on.  A few days ago, according to Slashdot, Peter Sunde appeared via Skype at the Open Video Conference in NY and said they were gearing up to launch something new.  Of course at that point speculation ran rampant.  What could it be?

Then, some changes appeared on TVB site.  And the the site suddenly stated for a while,

“To stay in the spirit on which TPB was founded and using the Latest Technology, TVB aims to use the new HTML5 features, more specifically the video and audio tags with the ogg/theora video and audio formats. This site will be an experimental playground and as such subjected to both live and drunk (en)coding, so please don’t bug us too much if the site ain’t working properly.”

I went and tried to check out TVB, which is currently in the roughest of beta modes, but couldn’t get anywhere other than seeing that the home page did indeed exist.  Apparently, this is a change from fairly recently, when the curious were able to tack random numbers on the end of the page URL to see movies that are on the page for beta-testers.  Of course, even that process was pure hit or miss.  You would, for example, be typing in a “21” after thevideobay.org/, without having any idea what movie might be showing up for you to view.  This little trick is no longer working at time of writing.  Now, when you do that, or click on any link, including the one to register, it asks you for your username and password.

So, when is it going to go live for the public?  That’s anyone’s guess.  Including The Video Bay.  They told TorrentFreak that “there is still a lot of work to do behind the scenes. The encoder is not finished yet and the design is also a work in progress.”  And, “it will be done when it’s done, in the future.”

One thing that should also be noted, they say they will not be implementing P2P technology to be streaming the videos.  The site definitely has potential become a key player in the video streaming area.  It’s going to be a site where users can share whatever - no censoring.  I can see heads in the movie industry steaming already.

Read: [slashdot]