Live Stream videos or sites not played live on my computer

I consider myself fairly good with computers (I have a B.S in comp-sci) but I have been having an odd problem lately. I can no longer watch youtube or live stream anything (pandora, online videos, etc.) or some live on my computer. I'm running windows 7 with 6 gig ram and an Intel i5 2.5GHz. Youtube will load about 5 seconds of video then stop and pandora works on occasion but I usually get the first 30 seconds or so of a song then just choppy skipping after that. I have tried using chrome, firefox, opera and IE and the problem persists across all browsers while when i visit  live stream sites.I find this particularly odd because I play a few relativity high-end online video games which run perfectly. Also, when I first got this computer about 6 months ago, these things worked fine, this has only been going on about a month. I have run virus scans, spyware scans, and I even restored my computer state back before this issue and I still can not use these things. Is there something I have missed? Anyone know what could possibly cause this annoying problem? Thanks.