What about Ch4 and ITV

"I do not undertand why it did not get its R+D department (who know a fair bit about compression technologies and have some clever ideas of their own) to develop a (better) platform independent solution - it could have licensed this to others."

Ermmm ... the Schrodinger project, with particular reference to the Dirac video codec? Lots and lots of potential there, although my understanding at the time I was at White City was that the whole thing was pretty much dead in the water and no significant development was occurring (BICBW)

Then again, I don't know of *any* company which is capable of seeing the bigger picture where R&D is concerned - if there isn't instant money to be made, the project gets canned or screwed to the point where they *can* get some ROI even if it means shipping a substandard product. I've had to put up with this sort of crap in more than one of my previous jobs.