Software and/or Hardware solution for multi camera recording and streaming setup

In a nutshell, I need a way to stream (or otherwise play) a movie along with 3 to 4 other 'show angles', with the user being able to change the stream they're viewing. End result should be a video player with links/buttons for the other angles, allowing the user to switch camera streams (angles) as they wish.

Here's an example: You load a page with a DIY video.. and since it includes a fairly detailed assembly process, there are 4 cameras recording different angles or locations of the work area (straight on - aka main camera, one above the work area, one to the left side angle and one to zoom on presenter).

The 'main' video is displayed when the page loads,. but you can switch to the other views at the click of a button.. without waiting for that new 'angle' video to buffer. Since each 'angle' will essentially be a separate stream/video file, the only thing I have come up with is to stream them simultaneous and when the users click the button for a specific stream, use JS to show/hide the corresponding video - which is by f开发者_如何学Pythonar NOT the most efficient (for load time or BW usage!)..

So, I'm hoping to get some feedback and advice on other ways to implement this type of video playback feature on the site. We'll can implement this in Flash/Flex, PHP or Ruby (RoR) as far as programming languages, so if you have something specific to those languages that would be especially helpful, but we are open to any suggestions!

NOTE: I'm also interested to hear any suggestions on hardware setup. Since a setup like this can range from the mild to the wild, it'll be helpful to know that we plan on starting with a very basic setup - 3-4 high quality web cams fed into a single computer with audio being provided by one of the cams or a lapel mic. Once we get the 'show' going, we'll progress to a more professional level setup with DV cameras and XLR fed audio... but, not at the start. So, any advice on hardware to pull this off to start is GREATLY appreciated. -- Sorry for the novel, I wanted to make sure to clarify this so you guys dont have to ask a bunch of questions about what I'm trying to accomplish. ;)

P.S. We can use PC or Mac, or both for the video CAPTURE implementation and we have linux servers for the STREAMING implementation