The Pirate Bay team has continued developing its video streaming site - which will open up to the public within 5 years. On The Video Bay users can share video clips without having to worry about getting them taken offline due to copyright violations, true Pirate Bay-style.

More than two years have passed since The Pirate Bay team first announced that they were working on a video streaming site. However, as with most of their projects it can take a while before the public can catch a glimpse of what they are working on.

The Video Bay – as the project is named – opened up to the public with a very early test version a few weeks ago. Initially, users were able to browse though the videos but this has been disabled now. What is left is an announcement that the site will be launched somewhere in the future.

“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,” it currently reads on the site’s main page.

The Video Bay Launches in Test Mode

How long it will take before the site will be opened up to the public is unknown. Pirate Bay’s TiAMO 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.

Pirate Bay Spokesman Peter Sunde agreed that it might take a while before the site goes live and told us that “it will be done when it’s done, in the future, in like a year or five.”

The Video Bay aims to implement some of the latest technologies including HTML 5 features such as the video and audio tags as well as the embedding of ogg/theora video and audio formats. However, it will not use p2p technology to stream the videos.

In time the site has the potential to become a major player in the video streaming area, similar to what BayIMG is for image hosting. A no-nonsense video sharing site where users can share whatever they want – uncensored. Hollywood will be delighted.

Update: Two preview clips are now available at the main page. Those who want to try out need a web browser that supports the HTML 5 tags such as the latest Firefox Beta or Safari 4.