Cloud computing is all vapour anyway.

I am surprised that nobody has mentioned it, but what about a server running AFS (Andrew File System).

It has some great features:

Scalable - you can add as many servers as you want
Secure - it uses kerberos by default
Fast - local caches are kept until another client needs them.
Cross platform - openAFS supports pretty much every platform in existence.

I have the same problem with the LiVES project. Over 3 years ago, I managed to compile the sourcecode for OSX/Darwin, it took a lot of fiddling around, but it worked. I excitedly posted the news on the website and mailing lists, but no OSX users seemed interested. Since then, the code has changed a lot, fixes were made for it to compile on IRIX and Solaris.
 
Recently somebody posted a forum message noting how easy it now is to compile under OSX. I again posted this news, and asked if somebody could kindly compile it and send me a link to the resulting binary. Since then...nothing. Hence I have come to a conclusion about OSX users...well, I will let you guess what it is.

The thing is, to keep it clean you have to run virus checkers, spyware removers, adware removers, etc, etc. Windows is just too hard for the average consumer.

In my experience, Linux outperforms Windows and Mac on the low end, the high end, and the middle end.

Free software is never a bad choice.

Boy, you sound stressed. Must be using Windows that causes it.

Yes.

Is there some reason why you cant just copy the video file from your browser cache (like you can do with other streaming video files) ? Otherwise this seems trivial to work around.