Duely noted, but I don't think it ought to make a difference in the price tag unless the CMS was doing conversion and distribution.

IIRC, their CMS was supposed to be the Holy Grail of video management. Centralized and decentralized storage, processing farms, search-by-image, advanced tagging, etc. Sounded quite impressive but from what I understand, there are now commercial solutions that have some of those feature sets. The way they explain it, when they started no one had these features.

...which it was. One of the big features was the ability to edit video in a lower bitrate (i.e. faster to work with) then send it off to a server to process on the full HD video. Great idea, but apparently it was a total mess to work with.

hours? This is the BBC. It is probably months, possibly years worth of material.

Very definitely years. It wasn't just for finished programmes (i.e. ~ number-of-channels*24 hours of footage/day): it was for all rushes. All the footage that was filmed in the course of making the final programme.

We're talking stupid quantities of data here and I've never seen a detailed answer to how it was all supposed to be stored.

I'm not going to pretend I know what I'm talking about because this project was VAST - but would't a mkv type solution over P2P (BitTorrent more specifically) been more practical? I can't help but think they tried to make it too complicated and it just collapsed, not much different than your typical startup.

Hours and hours and then more hours until you get to years.