A little off-topic, but I was under the impression that using the ffmpeg commercially was problematic, did you find you had to address that issue at all?
ffmpeg is LGPL; it is used by hundreds of commercial applications around the world. For that matter, it has no commercial competitors for many of its use-cases.
Even On2, a competing encoder company, includes instructions with its encoder on how to set up mplayer (which uses ffmpeg) for decoding input videos.
Besides which, it sounds like they're only using it in-house for processing, not distributing anything based on it. So even if they're not compiling it in LGPL mode, they're probably perfectly OK.
The main 'problem' is that you'll still require an MPEG licence for encoding and decoding. Once you've bought one and abide by the usual LGPL rules (don't claim ownership, make source & changes available if distributing) then there shouldn't be any more commercial issues than, say, using Linux.
