The Pirate Bay is a notorious peer-to-peer file sharing enabler via BitTorrent. Basically, while the Pirate Bay doesn't technically host or distribute music, video or software, it does make searching for software on the large peer-to-peer network ridiculously easy. Now a new idea is percolating into a "Beta Extreme" ultra-massive-distributed video service known as The Video Bay.

Distributed video servers are used all of the time and, indeed, having mirrored content on a number of servers in different locations is the very definition of reliability and performance. The various hubs are always relatively small in number. The Video Bay proposal is that you will now be able to stream video from your peers. So instead of just downloading and watching the new Transformers movie from a couple of hundred peers, you'd be able to simply click and watch the video via those same peers, with data packets coming from here, there and everywhere...

Of course this also represents very real and equally massive copyright violations, with The Video Bay's only possible defense being that they aren't actually copying or distributing anything. And you know what? They are right. But that does not excuse each individual peer in the network, each of which is clearly and unambiguously violating someone's exclusive copyright. You can see this on YouTube and The Pirate Bay already: music videos are by far and away the most popular clips on the services.

The Video Bay promises to be an ultra-efficient, low hosting cost, better-than-YouTube experience (faster, higher quality, more top-tier content) and represents a huge threat to the entertainment industry. One industry response (and probably the primary industry response) will be to try and shut it down. Not only is this basically technically impossible (because the distributed network will quickly adapt to whatever barriers are thrown up), but it's also probably legally impossible (since, once again, you can't sue a million peers). The real solution to this is to out-compete the pirates. If the entertainment industry offered a better, faster, higher-quality peer-to-peer network, you can bet it would make a bajillion dollars.

So you'd think the industry would be spending their resources on development, right? Well, at least one of the Big Players is: the BBC. Granted, the Beeb is a publicly funded service that isn't all about profit, profit, profit, but it's at least encouraging that they are looking to a real solution. It should also be noted that while The Video Bay is a new experiment that centralizes the experience with a YouTube-esque interface, there are actually quite a few P2P video streaming software apps already widely available.

References:
* http://thevideobay.org/
* http://www.bittorrent.com/
* Massively-Distributed Real-Time Video Broadcast (proposal, BBC)
* Open Source P2P Video Streaming Software