YouTube Leanback
youtube.com
youtube.com
I highly recommend this guy, he has over a million subscribers: http://bit.ly/b4aivv and you should buy his iPhone app ;)
also, they don't cycle through the videos automatically (i.e., it's not passive) -from one video to the next, how do you find other content to watch? Most of the other videos I end up clicking on turn out to be video responses and stuff like that.... I think this part of the youtube UX is pretty broken if you're just browsing videos. Even if it was active you would want to be able to click through to another video you want to see, but it doesn't work this way.
I don't doubt that youtube is making money from their ads, but I was just suggesting if they were to pay someone to curate their content they could still make money from it.
And YouTube isn't the only ones making money from this, the video creators are actually making 10-30K a month. From my experience working in this space curated videos will never draw as much of a following as individual video creators.
I was thinking about passive video watching today and the thing is I don't think that will ever really take off on the Internet. People are too busy when they are online, and sitting back and consuming content does not deliver the same 'buzz' as switching quickly from one topic to another. Our start-up delivers video content to users from Channels they love, intermittently throughout the day through Facebook/Email/phones, etc. This seems to be a much more realistic future for video content on the web. It seems to fit much more naturally into the experience of being online, than the idea that a user will sudden stopping 'browsing' and start leaning back. IMHO Leaning back in general may be dying.
You should really try to find a YouTube channel you like and start following along. Unless you do you will never really understand where (I believe) the future of video is going. If you didn't like my previous selection, try this guy he is great: http://www.youtube.com/user/KassemG
I also don't think that passive consumption of content is going anywhere. To take music as a parallel, radio is dead, but pandora is really taking off. I think you just have to be smart about how your content is presented and in what context. I would think there's plenty of room for youtube type sites to bleed over into where tv is now. There's no real reason really annoying orange couldn't be presented in a passive context. I might even watch it and think it was ok, but there's no way I would willingly click on it and watch the whole thing, let alone more than one of their videos. That's the problem with channels, and content discovery on the internet in general- You're asked to dive deep too soon, or when you only have a passing interest.
The fact that it's on the "internet" or that people are "online" shouldn't really matter. All devices are going to be hooked up to your wifi/home network soon, if they aren't already. (e.g. netflix, etc.) Not to mention mobile/tablets. We'll see if google can do something with googletv.
I just hope they add a way to add videos to the favorites and view the original youtube page for a video. Also a bit annoying that you can't control it with the mouse, but they'll probably fix that.
EDIT: Ah, I get it. Google connected a throwaway youtube account to my google account a while back. I disconnected them, which google interprets as "permanently disabled," which is not that same thing as "delete this link permanently" in my mind!
Does anyone know if this is done in HTML5?