I've got two computers at home that I use on a regular basis. Each computer can do certain things more easily than the other, mainly because I use Windows XP on one, and Linux on the other.
I've got a KVM switch that supports a USB keyboard and mouse, VGA video and even stereo audio, but that isn't enough. It doesn't allow me to play ScreamTracker modules in XMMS while working with Windows apps, and it doesn't let me play MIDI files while writing code in Linux.
An easy solution would be to mix the signals from the two computers, but that requires more cables. (and with two computers and a KVM switch, you know that more cables isn't what I need.)
I'd like to see an audio streaming system that replaces the OS's native audio playback methods. Under Linux, this would mean emulating the OSS or ALSA APIs. I don't know enough about Windows to suggest what needs to be done there.
The server should at least support OGG streaming. MP3 and WMA would probably also help.
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On a web forum I frequent, a user had a similar task. After some thinking, I thought that this task would be delightfully trivial if one could connect into codecs that have fast algorithms to do compression and decompression for each of the formats supported.
Essentially, as packets arrived, they would be decompressed,the values would be XOR'd, and then these values would be compressed again and sent to the machines that are subscribing to the multicast.
The chief problem comes in the necessary lightning-fast compression and decompression... to my knowledge, it just doesn't exist yet, although since I/O devices are so slow, perhaps they could keep up for just a couple of incoming streams.