This all sounds like a really good idea Brendan and i really hope that you will get this off the ground.

And the BBC Dirac Pro codec looks very promising, i remember stumbling over that some years ago and read somewhat up on it, but forgot about it when it never was supported by anything outside BBC.
It looks like it has all the features needed in production so what is holding it back? Is the encoder too slow? Is the quality not up to the other competing codecs DNxHD, ProRes and Cineform?
It is even a smpte standard (VC-2).

Looking forward to seeing the progress of this project.