I have been trying to learn more about SMIL recently. The concept sounds great but I am very concerned about the progress of this technology. Some of the SMIL links on the W3C site are dead and many of them are from the late 90'S. Is SMIL just about dead?
On a more positive note, I had an idea that I hope will be helpful.
Regardless of what technology we use to generate an animated SVG, the animation is unlikely to be available to the masses with IE sucking as it does. I really am not qualified to offer tips to anyone here but on the off chance that no one has thought of it, perhaps we could generate an SVG animation locally, use a screencasting application and then save it as whatever-common-video-format.
With a browser identification we could then load the animated SVG to the browser that supports it and the whatever-common-video-format to the others.
-Patrick