I'd be interested in hearing how you found that Rabbit site to work in practice, as I hadn't heard of it before now. The old AD animu-watching group we still have plodding along has everyone queue up the episodes and countdown to start playing. The one benefit we've found over the years is that, when someone's connection was flaky (especially when we were still using AIM, dear lord), so long as everyone was connected when we started, everyone could still stay on-pace with the episode through any disconnects.