Great idea! This would be particularly useful for niche topics that don't have good meetup groups in all big cities. All the effort the organizers spend on finding high-quality speakers and attracting the right crowd could be multiplied. We have been thinking about running our Berlin NLP meetup (
http://www.meetup.com/de-DE/Berlin-Language-Technology) more remotely, but the only thing we've done so far is posting videos of the talks online.
Meetup.com has been really great for us in getting attention for our _local_ meetup, but it isn't the right tool if you are running it non-locally/remotely. Sth. like meetup.com in terms of discoverability + a standardized tech infrastructure (sth. that "just works") for remote meetups is desperately needed.