Yes, it is possible to watch nice videos through the internet, but navigating them is a hassle. Let others 'program' your list of videos and then subscribe to their playlist using RSS, hook up your livingroom screen to the machine playing this list and presto! You have got yourself as many television channels as you want, without the advertising.

Ideally you can just let it run as ordinary television, with shows that suit the time of the day.

It could be as easy as having one stable, open mediaplayer like VLC that supports many formats to accept playlists. Unfortunately VLC does not yet play flv. Miro does, but there are no channels yet and it does not play anything (and you can't add subtitles).
-- rrr, Sep 19 2007

Miro http://www.getmiro.com/
a videoplayer that accepts playlists as 'channels' [rrr, Sep 19 2007]

VLC http://www.videolan.org/vlc/
a mediaplayer that is open and does not play online sources well [rrr, Sep 19 2007]

random, halfbakery