Your friendly neightborhood list-lurker, Cat Hebert, here.
If you can pull it off, the standalone java application seems to me to
have a lot of promise and has the added advantage of being right in the
direction people are thinking about for this sort of integrated
production concept -- so that it isn't a bad career-enhancing project
for developers. Especially the notion of keeping backgrounds/graphics in
local storage (DVD is the most likely medium for large-scale apps of
this sort, but I assume there are lots of other ways graphics can be
bundled in java).
For live production, the webcam encoder is being used by a number of
live shooting operations -- including TVOnline, CNET and others, and
it's designed by an extremely articulate, arts-aware Frenchman, Jacques
Matteij. Also.....VivoActive is introducing a new product that allows
you to digitize and encode in the same webserver. (Code named "raptor".)
Good luck with it. I'll be very interested in the results.
Cheers,
Cat Hebert
The Virtual Drama Society