Pirate Bay starts video streaming

The new video streaming service is set to feature music and film

The world's most high-profile file-sharing website, The Pirate Bay (TPB), has lifted the lid on its new video sharing website, The Video Bay.

Billed as a rival to YouTube, the service will offer unrestricted video content, in violation of copyright law.

It is not clear when the service will actually go live; the site's founders said "it will be done when it's done".

In April, a court in Sweden jailed four men behind The Pirate Bay and ordered them to pay $4.5m (£3m) in damages.

TPB founder Peter Sunde announced The Video Bay to the Open Video Conference in New York.

In a statement on the site, Mr Sunde said the service would use the latest HTML 5 features, "more specifically the audio and video tags with the ogg/theora video and audio formats".

"This site will be an experimental playground and as such subjected to both live and drunken coding, so please don't bug us too much if the site isn't working properly," he said.

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Although the site is in its early stages, a preview showed a number of copyright music videos available for viewing in the navigation sidebar.

The move will be seen by some as provocative, given that the founders of The Pirate Bay were found guilty of breaking copyright law and were sentenced to a year in jail in April, though they are currently still free men.

Piracy battle

Speaking to the BBC, the head of Sweden's Pirate Party, Rickard Falkvinge, said this was another step in a "prolonged legal battle with the record industry".

"It's obvious that, given enough time, The Pirate Bay will win this war which will go on as long as the record industry has yet another penny to file a lawsuit.

"I think they [The Pirate Bay] are taking an important part in that battle, fighting for freedom of expression and culture against monopolistic companies," he added.

A spokesman for the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry said they were monitoring developments but declined to comment at this time.