I personally disagree. I HATE getting linked to something that then autoplays a video — I don’t always know before clicking a link that a video is the main content. If I want it to play, I will press the play button.
just like you can grant a site permission to use your microphone, get your location, run flash plugins, or any of various other things, the ability to auto-play video should be a permission that sites have to ask for, not something they can do implicitly.
YouTube at least stops the autoplay when you are not looking at the tab or while scrolling down through the comments. A behavior I much prefer compared to the usual news sites behavior of "Let's just play this video, hidden somewhere halfway down the site in a side-frame, no matter what".