The PyCon live stream we did was a pretty good case study. We pretty much hacked together a pub/sub system on top on BLPOP, so it'd be even easier going forward. Hopefully we'll open source it :/ (we've been meaning to for a while now...)
The ruby, python, and node.js clients support non-BLPOP pubsub. We are starting to see some layers added atop this (e.g. NodeRed).