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If it was so easy for someone else to offer an alternative service, there would be dozens of them

There are dozens of them. By no means a complete list:

GotoMeeting

Webex

Yuugu

TeamViewer

Mikogo

CrossLoop

I confess I never used it but WebEx, which is a big name in enterprise video conferencing, apparently uses Java from within the web browser. It's not Flash but it's about as secure.

I personally work at a virtual company, and aside from a neighbor which also works there, I have rarely met my coworkers in person. We use WebEx in order to have online meetings, and work on things together. We use Groopex Integrated Conferencing to integrate WebEx with our corporate site to easily schedule meetings and launch them. We use Google Apps to share various office documents around. We use MediaWiki to keep track of current projects, todo lists, documentation, and other important information. Lastly, for source code, we use various version control system with nice web frontends so the managers can see that we actually work on things.

For quick conversation with coworkers, we have an IRC server, and if we really need someone else urgently, we just pick up this archaic technology known as the "telephone".

*cough*http://www.webex.com/*sneeze*
*bluuaaaargh*Reverse VNC*pfffft*

Similarly, The Dojo Toolkit is a very strong JS library/toolkit/framework/whatever. I'm interning at WebEx, and I've been doing almost all my work with it. It's been a joy to use, especially for someone like me who has otherwise struggled with more complicated JavaScript.

VNC would be my first choice. Beware that even TightVNC and UltraVNC tend to automatically default to optimal settings for a LAN and not a WAN, so be sure to make all the clients check jpeg compression settings and test in advance. You'd want them to set their desktop resolution to match yours (the scaling sucks). With everything tuned, you'd get pretty good refresh rates, even with some modestly sized movies or animations. Mind that you'll have to find a separate channel to deliver audio.

Next you might want to consider H323 conferencing... gnomemeeting, netmeeting, and the like. In addition to voice and webcams, they should give you desktop sharing, text chat, and a whiteboard and crap. (Under Windows XP, netmeeting is hidden but still available via "Run | conf.exe")

If you have a high-end corporate conference room setup (with a Tandberg or Polycom VTC unit) that would make things much simpler in that you could simply plug your laptop into the VGA input. This could also get you better than POTS audio quality (8kHz mono). Very few conference rooms I've seen have bothered to set this up, though. Anyway, since they all speak H323, anyone with gnomemeeting or netmeeting should be able to join and watch and listen (albeit maybe at a lower quality, always test first :P ).

http://webex.com/ is another option, though I haven't played with their linux client yet. It can be a real dog with desktop updates (advancing a slide can take several seconds to update at all of the clients). However if you do it the right way and use their PPT preloader & displayer, things should be smooth. Like VNC, you'd want to coordinate desktop resolutions beforehand... it doesn't do any type of scaling.

Finally if you're into building your own thing, you can grab a video capture card such as http://www.unigraf.fi/?page=64 and use Windows Media Encoder, VideoLAN, etc. to deliver video content from any PC source to your clients using streaming video. Lots of testing and tweaking required, but you can basically take any full motion video or 3D content and chuck it over a network in multiple bit rates, have a recording to archive and playback later, etc. And all everyone needs is a media player. Mind that audio is only one-way.

I'm actually at work right now, but I am about to go home and work from home for the next few hours, because they are moving our data center, which means the main network will be down. I will have no way to support our clients from here, since we typically use WebEx. No internet connection = no support. We do have some clients who still use modem, but I would say we typically only use that route about 5-10% of the time, which means that 90% of my job relies on the internet.

Get Lily Tomlin on the line, she's got work to do.

Last I heard she was on a few commercials for Webex, so I think she has her plate full.

we use http://www.webex.com/ at our work, works a treat behind a multitude of firewalls and maybe even proxies if I remember rightly.

you should check it out :)

Webex sells "solutions" that "empower your workforce". And "solutions" are expensive:

"WebEx Meeting Center Pro: $199 per concurrent port/month"

I don't know what a concurrent port is, but I'm guessing there needs to be a lot of them. $2,388.00 per year for each concurrent port.

I think Webex is expensive but it works. You can share applications across a presentation. You can accomodate dial-in capabilities. It takes a little bit to learn how to host a presentation but it's easy for participants.

You might look into WebEx conferencing software. http://webex.com/
It does great video feeds and might do what your looking for.
It's an amazing product!

Use WebEx. They make online meeting software that works pretty seamlessly. Get a "pay as you go" account. The pricing is pretty reasonable. At $.33/user/minute, you're looking at $.99/minute with 3 pubs. An hour long show would cost 60 bucks - not bad. Check them out and give them a call.

Nice summary...

In a support pinch or in a training/presentation situation, Webex (not free, a service) can be very useful... It uses an Active-X browser plugin, seems to get through firewalls pretty easily , is fairly speedy/light, and is pretty extensible.

http://www.webex.com/

A vendor helped me out of a tight spot once via Webex to my laptop that was serialed into a hosed NAS box -- much quicker and safer, and more effective than punching our firewall into Swiss cheese.

From my perspective, that's exactly what VNC is most appropriate for. The "enabling the user to watch" isn't always important, but it does come in handy regularly. It's also possible to run a "view only" VNC session, for when you want to show a bunch of people how to do something by remote. (And other posters have mentioned programs which can be used to record VNC sessions for playback later.)

VNC's other major benefit is its cross-platform availability - any combination of Microsoft(r) Windows, commercial Unix, non-proprietary Unix (*BSD), Linux, MacOSX, and I would have sworn some of the PDA OS's can all connect to each other with it. It beats paying a fortune for permission to use the Webex services for it. (Webex is actually a fairly nice package, but permission to use it is somewhat expensive, geared mainly towards mid-to-large corporate environments for teleconferencing...)

The one downside VNC has is that it seems to be a little slower than some of the more restricted-availability methods (much as I hate most of MS's software design, they DID seem to do a good job getting RDP working efficiently, for example).

I guess you don't use web conferencing tools then.

1. WebEx
   
2. iLinc
   
3. Placeware
   

IE only, others need not apply. WebEx and iLinc both give a tiny bit of lip service to alternatives, but stop short of a product that will work if you don't have Win32 and iexplore.exe.

This stuff is way beyond VNC and keeps my travel schedule down at 50% instead of 90%. Worth keeping a Windows VM around for.

I think there already something like this for windows. It is called webex I recall seeing a demo at my place of business. They want outrageous prices for something like this.

Projectplace
eRoom
Webex (even if Webex uses some client that connects to their server)

I wouldn't say that the era of web based software has come, but it's well on its way.

I thought web-based virtual conferencing (like Webex) was going to eliminate much of the need to get from point A to point B via a low fuel efficiency, high pollution method.