[sbouafif]

It's completely normal for Netflix to work on that and end-consumers wont see a difference.

That's exactly what's been done by illegal release groups (pirated content) which are very picky when it comes to time to release (encoding/sharing) and do their best to encode fast enough while having a good viewable quality.

When it comes to encoding, even for a large library like Netflix's, time to encode is always lesser than time/bandwith saved while sharing/streaming.

As of now, Netflix 1080p raw content (not transcoded) is delivered at a bitrate of 5200kbps/5900kbps with no differences between the content (animated or live action - here I compared BoJack Horseman to The Ridiculous 6). While many (or even all) high quality release groups encode animated bluray at around 3000Kbps (1080p) (around 5500kbps for very high quality) while live action is encoded at around 11.0Mbps. The same difference is applied when the content is capped from TV and then encoded.

[paulmd]

This also varies by the target audience.

Stuff that is released via publically-tracked torrent (i.e. for mass-market audiences) often targets around 1.5-2 GB for a feature-length movie in 1080p. In contrast, releases aimed at Usenet (the technical crowd) are often 6-7 GB and sometimes as large as 11-13 GB for the same movie.

On the other hand the situation is much more equitable for audio. Lossless audio torrents are pretty common even in the torrent world, and due to the typically greater number of torrents available the overall selection of lossless files is probably at least as large as on Usenet.

I would assume that private trackers tend towards higher-quality releases.