Before I get to a criticism of your appeal, let me first praise your great work on the website. It is worthy successor to SOAP Gameday. The movable and sizable windows within the page are truly impressive coding. Providing a place where the FIRST community can go to find all the webcasts is truly valuable. I hope everyone uses your chat, because a centralized chat is much better than everyone in different regional chats.
You hit the nail right on the head, plugins are the problem. However, while the WMP plugin may be the worst, flash plugin isn't perfect either. That brings me to my point: a web browser is not the optimal solution to streaming video from multiple sources, since it has significant overhead (plugins).
With ustream.tv you have no choice other than use a web browser with flash to view it. With MMS you can use a web browser with WMP, but there is a better option of using a media player, particularly VLC. I routinely view multiple webcasts in multiple VLC instances an they all play smoothly only using a small amount of CPU (a each take fraction, about 1/3 for me, of what it takes for the shockwave plugin to play a single ustream). I recommend using checking "Always on Top" and using "Minimal View" (ctrl-h) so you have several sizable windows that will show up on top of other windows (like a web browser). VLC works across all platforms (much better than Flash IMHO as a Linux dual boot user)
Ustream is free (nice), but the ads are very annoying. The ones across the bottom obscure the score and are a hassle to keep closing (particularly on multiple ustreams across 2 laptops). The ads that play fullscreen interrupt matches and play at full sound even when you previously muted that stream (so they disrupt the audio to the regional you were listening to). NASA provides us with hosting for MMS streams so they should be used whenever possible instead of ustream IMHO. Other solutions like 987's flash (archive working for San Diego), provide benefits like instant archiving and ranking updates.
So here is the constructive part of my criticism. I suggest you keep your windows for the MMS feeds but encourage your visitors not to use them. Use part of that blank webpage area (that windows will later be placed over) to give them instruction on how to download, install and use VLC. Provide them these addresses for feeds to past into VLC.
Greater Kansas City
http://streaming.more.net/robomatcheslive
Florida
http://mfile.akamai.com/77131/live/r...asx?bkup=56948
Wisconsin
mms://sargasso-3.arc.nasa.gov/wisconsinregional
Lake Superior
mms://sargasso-3.arc.nasa.gov/duluthregional
WPI
mms://sargasso-3.arc.nasa.gov/wisconsinregional
New York (when it is available)
Stop worrying about the flaky WMP plugin and its inability to resize (nice solution with the small & large options) by offloading it to VLC or other media player where it belongs.
Finally, thank you and all the people involved with the webcasts for their tremendous contributions to the FIRST community. I'm very glad your site exists so I can easily arrange the ustream feeds and chat in one page (last year I made a quick and dirty page to embedd all the ustream stuff for that week and opened it in my browser). Enjoy this weekend's webcasts everyone, the elims should be amazing!