* Some programming, like quick bursts of activity after an epiphany, can be very lively. These moments can be surfaced to viewers if the right signals are used.
* It can be a million people with an audience of 10, not just 10 people with an audience of a million. It could be useful for real-time distributed projects to have collaborators' streams open. Or track a favorite open-source project whenever the developer is working on it.
* It would also work well if scheduled and with a specific task in mind, especially if the programmer is a "rockstar". (Similar to Notch's recent performance.) e.g. "7pm-8pm PST Linus will begin Git forking refactor". As a performance, could also be used for code walkthroughs instead of actual coding.
* Even though it's live-streamed, it can be still be packaged into highlights later, and the best way to do it is to have the raw content available for anyone to remix it. Different work can also be curated together to highlight a common theme.
* Regarding video quality, that's an easy fix given that most programming remains text-based. The obvious solution is to capture high-level terminal content rather than just plain old video. A coding session could then even be curated into posts like http://asciicasts.com/.
It's interesting to see different people's workflows and mindsets, so I think it's worth pursuing this, and it could be very popular with the number of people learning to code right now.