I like #3 the most.
I appreciate the effort, they all look great!
But can I be completely honest? I think they're all a bit too long.
You quote an NPR Producer, who with regard to podcasts said: “If you don’t hook people in like the first minute… You’re screwed!”
For video content, I think you can easily replace minutes with seconds here. When I click on a video on Youtube and I don't know what's going on within 5 sec, I'm either scrolling to another part of the video, or I click another video (meaning you've lost me).
Advertisers know this. The advertised videos that play in front of the video you actually want to see can be clicked away after 5 secs. So they have 5 secs to impress the viewer, or they're gone. And they never get to see the rest of the possibly epic content.
So my advice: keep the awesomeness, but cap the length of the intros at 5-7 seconds max.