The Pirate Bay has sold out, to a Swedish company no one has ever heard of. The acquisition has been confirmed but the future of the site is still mired in confusion. Could this be a Napster moment for the file-sharing community, or could this actually be a good thing?

Things happen fast in the world of peer-to-peer torrent tracking. Just a few days after unveiling The Video Bay, a new streaming video site based on open source video standards, The Pirate Bay had even bigger news to announce this morning: it’s selling out.

Sold Or Sold Out?

The Swedish press broke the news story first, forcing The Pirate Bay to confirm the truth in a blog post earlier today. The Pirate Bay has been bought by Swedish software company, Global Gaming Factory X AB.

The price, a cool $7.7 million, is enough to pay the $3.6 million in fines racked up by the four co-founders of the site in their recent court case, and have enough left over to ensure they never have to work again, or at least be able to walk away from the whole thing better off than when they began.

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The video streaming sector of online video is already a very crowded place. Lead by YouTube, there are also many other video sharing sites trying to compete. And now The Pirate Bay is preparing to join the battle with a little site it calls The Video Bay.

The Pirate Bay

Whether they’ve used it or not, almost everyone will have heard of The Pirate Bay. It’s not the largest torrent tracker in the world, that honor goes to Mininova, but it is the most notorious. In fact, the people behind the site go out of their way to cause controversy, stoke the fires of file-sharing, and generally try to upset the big media companies currently fighting P2P technology.

The Pirate Bay’s latest innovation is unlikely to change how the site is viewed by people in the industry. Not content with providing one of the wheels in the cog required to share files online over a network, The Pirate Bay now wants to try its hand at video streaming.

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ISPs have been showing concern for the amount of bandwidth used by online video for some time now. However, the first salvo now seems to have been launched in a war that is likely to get very bloody over the next few years.

Net Neutrality Vs. Costs

Net Neutrality is the idea that all Internet traffic should be treated the same, no matter where it’s coming from, or what it’s being used for. It’s an important tenet for the future of online video because here is a medium that, by its very nature, requires more bandwidth than any other.

Cisco recently estimated that, by 2013, 90 percent of total Web traffic will be from video. This is down to the fact that video uses more data than Web pages, images, or text files. As well as the fact that online video is growing ever more popular, with new services being launched and new viewers discovering the joy of video on demand.

ISPs are not happy with the way things are going. Most, at least in the UK, now offer services with unlimited bandwidth and downloads. More fool them, maybe, but while offering customers these kinds of deals, they are starting to complain about being burdened with the costs of delivering online video.

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Bing, Microsoft’s latest attempt at changing Internet search, has already caused controversy thanks to its live video thumbnails search results. Not only is porn accessible on the site, but being able to play videos without ever visiting the source raises possible fair use concerns.

Internet Search Options

The Internet search market is dominated by one company - Google. The company boasts an almost two-thirds share of the market, managing 64.2 percent of all searches compared to the 20.4 percent managed by Yahoo! and just 8.2 percent by Microsoft. No wonder then that Microsoft is currently rebranding and re-energizing its search engine.

The result is Bing, which launched over the weekend. It’s very much like Google, sharing many of the same features and elements as the market leader, including results for online video. But Microsoft is also trying to redefine the power of search, which it’s managing to do already, just not in the way it intended. The name just makes me think of Chandler Bing from Friends (pictured above) but there’s worse to come.

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Piracy, in all its many forms, is illegal the world over. However, Internet piracy is a law unto itself, with different countries dealing with the issue in completely different ways. In Spain it seems that even downloading thousands of movies doesn’t make you a hardline criminal deserving of punishment.

Internet Piracy

The Internet has been a boon in so many aspects of our lives. But for the entertainment industry, it has meant a sea change in terms of the battle it faces over piracy. A guy selling knock-off DVDs down the pub is one thing, a system which allows the whole world to freely share brand new release movies with each other is another altogether.

Faced with this onslaught of the file sharing of copyrighted material, which is what it amounts to whether you believe it to be right or not, the entertainment industry is reliant on the laws backing its position and the courts upholding these laws. Which they don’t always do.

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The BBC iPlayer is currently a free service to all those living in the UK. However, that could be about to change, with the BBC considering a range of options to cover the cost of the service, currently not a part of the TV license fee. So, would you pay to use the BBC iPlayer?

The BBC iPlayer

The BBC iPlayer is an astoundingly solid and reliable service which offers all UK residents the chance to watch BBC programming for up to seven days after broadcast. It has gained in popularity massively over the last year or so and is now used by a fair portion of British television viewers.

With that in mind, you’d think that the BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) would be happy with the way things are going with its Web strategy. And it is to a certain extent. However, there’s one massive loophole that the BBC, or at least its technology chief Erik Huggers, thinks needs closing. As usual, it comes down to money.

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Porn is popular and profitable, especially on the Internet where the thirst for it is insatiable and where every need is catered for. But can a peer-to-peer BitTorrent company monetize porn to the extent it becomes a business in its own right - especially when free, pirated porn is readily available?

The Internet Is For Porn

There’s no way to get around the fact that one of the most popular aspects of the Internet is for porn. The Avenue Q song, The Internet Is For Porn, rather says it all. Not only is it hugely popular but it’s also one of the most profitable slices of the Internet, whether your morals tell you that is right or wrong.

BitTorrent companies, on the other hand, may provide a service which many of us use on a regular basis but making money is a little trickier. As the four founders of The Pirate Bay will attest, the money made doesn’t cover the cost of the fines meted out when your company is taken to court for copyright infringements.

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