YouTube has reached a new agreement with commercial airline Virgin America that brings web video content to passengers during flights, the site announced today.

Beginning Dec. 15, passengers can watch videos from five YouTube channel partners on the small screen that’s in the back of each seat’s head rest. The content includes Warner Brothers’ H+ The Digital Series, WIGS’ Blue, Geek & Sundry’s Written By a Kid, Crash Course, and Barely Political’s The Key of Awesome. — so, not exactly a playlist of 20 funny cat videos you may have missed.

“We chose content that is reflective of the diversity available on YouTube today,” YouTube CMO Danielle Tiedt told VentureBeat in an email. “The selection provides a nice representation of the content that our partners are creating for the platform and gets it in front of an audience in a new and unique way.”

A new crop of videos will roll out every two months, according to YouTube. The videos are only available on flights within the U.S. and Mexico, which I suspect has something to do with licensing. It’s unknown at this time if a different selection of YouTube channel partner videos will be available on other international flights, but it wouldn’t be surprising.

The move is a serious win for YouTube, which is currently trying to show people its content is every bit as good (if not better) as what’s on traditional television. (I’d much rather watch some original YouTube videos than watch reruns of unfunny broadcast network sitcom or a subpar movie that was recently in theaters.) It’ll be interesting to see if this new partnership ends up driving long-term traffic to these particular YouTube channel partners as well.

Virgin America flights do provide passengers with in-flight Wi-Fi, and many people can argue that as a result, this deal really doesn’t mean much. I definitely have to disagree, because I’ve consumed tons of reality TV shows because I was bored and nothing else was on.

YouTube said it plans to make similar deals over the next year to get its content in front of people in new ways.

Photo via YouTube

YouTube has rolled out a new rewards program for its most popular video partners, the company announced today.

Channel partners that have over a million subscribers are getting a shiny new plaque/trophy frame containing (what I’m assuming is) a genuine gold “Play” button as a sign of accomplishment. About 80 partners are getting the plaque, including EpicMealTime, Ellen DeGeneres, The Lonely Island, Mondo Media, Machinima, VEVO, and a handful of individual music artists. The site is also sending any YouTube partner with over 100,000 channel subscriptions a $500 gift card and a camera case. YouTube says about 1,400 channels reached this criteria.

For the big fish channel partners, $500 isn’t much of anything, since most of them make enough money from YouTube and other distribution deals to count their content creation as a primary job. But for the smaller channel partners, a $500 gift card — if put back into the production business — has the potential really improve the quality of content.

And that’s part of YouTube’s current strategy for boosting the amount of premium original videos available on its site. YouTube’s parent company Google committed $100 million on channel partnerships back in October 2011 to ensure that this strategy succeeds. More recently, the site committed to spending another $200 million on promoting those channel partners as well as their content. Another way YouTube is attempting to upgrade its quality is through partnerships with pre-existing media organizations, such as Reuters, Ridley Scott, and Bleacher Report.

Perhaps more interesting than the rewards program was the viewership statistics YouTube released. The total number of subscriptions from all YouTube partner channels is more than 500 million, which brings in and 251 billion monthly views. That’s  36 views for every person on the planet, according to the site.

Images via YouTube