"...we regularly pass around near-gigabyte raw sound recordings of interviews with guests. With my connectivity it takes about half an hour to transfer something like that."
Sorry to snipe, but wouldn't high bitrate MP3 reduce that near-gigabyte WAV to about 60 MB? 256 VBR encoding would do that, and should be good enough for broadcast. Certainly it would put you well ahead of BBC DAB broadcasts in the UK, in quality/bitrate terms.