The hardware broadcaster was my suggestion. It should be dead-simple, with inputs for video, power, and ethernet - configurable through a web interface, just like a router.
If you can make it cheap enough (< $100 would be my guess), we have a lot of gamers who I believe would buy one. You wouldn't have to write much software - for example vlc can already stream to jtv.
The real problem with ASIC solutions is that they generally have terrible compression; you usually don't get good results until you get up to the range of tens of thousands of dollars (for real broadcast encoders). Combined with the utter lack of upload bandwidth that most users have, this could become a serious problem.
The best option I could see in the near future is ARM's recently-announced 2Ghz quad-core CPU; it's low-power enough and hopefully cheap enough to stick in a small box but fast enough to run a good encoder at a good resolution. But even that would probably put the cost well above $100, at which point you might as well start selling capture cards and using peoples' CPUs instead.
Wonder if it'd be possible to do this in software - much like the cheat code type cheat systems that you load up, it could just load up the streaming software.
Might take longer to get working, but would end up easier sell/cheaper.
If you can make it cheap enough (< $100 would be my guess), we have a lot of gamers who I believe would buy one. You wouldn't have to write much software - for example vlc can already stream to jtv.