This particular subject has gone back and forth over the past few years. We’ve had a “user queue” for a long time, which has elements of what you and Fred are talking about (http://blog.mefeedia.com/index.php?s=queue). We recently renamed this to just “watch”, which will become apparent why in a few moments… I think the “user queue” is what you are alluding to, rather than search or tag feeds.

User queues are useful, depending on the type of video. Three good examples would be:

1. Serial video – i.e. users want to know when the latest episode of Lost is available and “queue” it to watch later. This is where the Subscribe/Queue mechanism works best.

2. Rapid playlisting, such as one might do in a video search for a topic of high interest to you.

3. Friends’ recommendations where you can queue up everything that is recommended by friends (i.e. from Twitter, FF, YouTube, FB, etc…)

However, for a lot of user videos or viral videos (which, i would argue, is still the majority of mainstream video consumption right now), this isn’t as useful as that is typically more of a “watch now” experience rather than a “watch later” (i.e. why we now call it “watch”, since a queue implies having to wait and we wanted it to encompass both the watch now and watch later experiences).

Based on what we have seen, search feeds (and to some extent, tag feeds) work great for queuing. Recent news and events are great applications of this. For example, having a constant, auto-updating search stream of new videos on the Iran Elections is very conducive to a lean-back experience where you can flip from video to video.

There are a lot of variations on this, of course… i am looking forward to the continued discussion.

It allows me to bookmark videos to watch later, and it transcodes them to make them available to most popular platforms either streamed or downloaded as a podcast