I tried what you suggested, but it did not make any difference _ I even tried taking any reference to JQuery completely out of the index.php for the template, with no luck.
So ...
I tried changing the template of my video page to a standard Joomla template and the player view worked just fine ... so ... I then compared the code that page generated with the code my template was generating and noticed there was a reference to Mootools javascript in the Joomla template, but for some reason not in my template. I copied the Mootools reference:
from the Joomla template into the index.php of my template and suddenly the Player View worked!
I will continue to do some more testing, but hopefully this is the solution to the problem.
Now, one other question ... I noticed on your demo site of the Player View template that you have arrows on both sides of your thumbnails that show additional available videos so that a viewer can scroll through them. Is there a check box I am missing/have overlooked that make these arrow icons show up. On my page I only have "start, next, end" links to navigate these thumbnails.
Thanks for your help!