UK News: New BBC Codec in production
As a ex-employee of the BBC back in 2001 I heard that the BBC R&D were developing there own Codec to reduce and replace the license its has to pay to Real Network and Microsoft to use its streaming technology.
Read about Dirac here
The codec, called Dirac, is in the early stages of development, the experimental version of the code, written in C++, is released under an Open Source licence agreement on at http://sourceforge.net/projects/dirac You can download and compile to run on OS X.