The lack of a true, independent, freestanding multimedia application which can handle this sort of thing -- building and managing queues, interrupting, deleting, sorting, etc. -- puzzles me.

The browser is such an obviously poor place to stick A/V. Other than, of course, the fact that advertisers slobber over cramming every more crap down some "channel" or other.

Well, Google has a history of preferring HTML above all other interfaces. Only when someone else comes along and offers a better native interface, they jump in.

Thank god there's a native iOS/Android client.

It's not the transport that's the problem, it's the app.

Meredith L. Patterson has addressed the point of Port 80 (or 443) adequately. For the time being, we're locked into that.

My point is that handing of A/V material to a dedicated AV app is, all else considered, probably optimal. It's the 4th browser replacement mentioned in my "Tabbed Browsing" rant, elsewhere in this thread.