Oh man I can't wait for the rational, level-headed discussions that would come out of this.

But yeah I do think a project like this will be inevitable, it just remains to be seen how palatable people will find it

Nah, I'd much rather go down the micro transaction route. You get to watch some portion of the video (say, 30s), then you need to pay a few cents to continue.

We'd need a centralized payment service to keep costs down, but the rest can be decentralized. I'm thinking we'd use something like GNU Taler, so you'd load up your account, use Taler to pay creators, and then creators could cash in every to often.