Much of the coverage was from video phones and not satellite uplinks. Video phones have reduced data rates and if you do a search you'll find several discussions about the war coverage and the video phones used by some of the networks and the embedded journalists.

I believe the ATI radeon all-in-wonder will encode MPEG2 in real-time. However, I believe divX is much better for compressing video. Internet pirates use it all the time to compress 2 hour movies into a 700-800MB download. Of course, they use 2-pass VBR encoding which takes a long time. If your computer is fast enough, it can encode full resolution divX in real-time (you need a pentium 3.2 or an overclocked system or something). Then you have to send this over the internet (doable) and the other side will have to transcode (maybe they can play the divX movie and spit out analog, or use rad video tools which is free). Encoding is always a tradeoff between quality/size/time, but you can get pretty good results. Movies on Kazaa have about a 160:1 compression ratio, while DV is 5:1. You will get very very good quality with 2000kbps constant bit rate encoding (CBR = doable in real time). That's 250kB/s. I forget how sound factors into this, but sound compression is amazing nowadays. You can compress 20:1 virtually lossless.

Otherwise, hire someone to be a runner. That might be faster if you're trying to do 1 or 2 hours.