In this paper, we tackle the problem of characterizing the aesthetic appeal of consumer videos and automatically classifying them into high or low aesthetic appeal. First, we conduct a controlled user study to collect ratings on the aesthetic value of 160 consumer videos. Next, we propose and evaluate a set of low level features that are combined in a hierarchical way in order to model the aesthetic appeal of consumer videos. After selecting the 7 most discriminative features, we successfully classify aesthetically appealing vs. aesthetically unappealing videos with a 73% classification accuracy using a support vector machine. Key words: Video aesthetics, video quality, subjective assessment