Here are some coding conferences that have used it so far: Hacksummit (30k attendees, http://ccst.io/e/hacksummit-2014), Genesis Camp (http://ccst.io/e/genesiscamp1), ANZCoders (http://ccst.io/e/anzcoders2015), Wordsesh (http://ccst.io/e/wordsesh)
You can set up multiple sessions with different panels and talks across multiple days. The architecture is built to scale. It's a client-side angular app primarily talking to Firebase. With this model I've been able to hold the world's largest virtual conference (http://hacksummit.org). We had everyone from DHH (creator of rails) to Hakon Le (inventor of css) speak.
To take it one-step further I added analytics around your event and Crowdcast keeps track of when you answer your audience's questions so that they can jump straight to the video answers once the event is over. Finally, your event is automatically recorded and instantly shareable.
Would love to see how the HN community uses this to organize their own conferences
Would crowdcast solve these problems by providing a better interface for the presenter(s)? or is it still relying on the existing hangouts interface?
Although it works fine 90% of the time, we were able to run the largest virtual conf in history, every once in a while hangouts does still do strange things. Luckily for that reason we made Crowdcast decoupled from the video service, you can use it with Livestream, Ustream, or anything with an embed code.