[logicallee]

My comment has nothing to do with DRM. I'm saying, "if there is no DRM" (or it is broken or can be broken), then the difference between downloading and streaming might be the difference between taking 2.2 days to "stream to disk" Game of Thrones (60 episodes @ 55 minutes) -- or, say, downloading it in 4 hours. (If downloads are allowed to be faster than realtime, which would only make sense.) GoT is obviously a hypothetical example.

If you don't think that makes quite a real difference in enabling or incentivizing actual piracy then I think I'll just disagree - that rate limit is a huge difference in my book and makes it far more likely for someone to take the trouble to rip and transcode.

[izacus]

You imply that there's speed throttling when streaming. There's not and it makes no difference if you're connecting to a streaming endpoint or just getting a downloaded file.

(Which you can confirm by fast availability of streamed content on torrent sites or if you actually test the streams.)

[logicallee]

Thanks. Are you saying you could "stream" a 50 minute episode in 3 minutes even before this announcement?

Your second statement (about torrent sites) implies that everyone was already "downloading" content and NetFlix's servers were happy to serve the streams as a single very fast download without regard to how long it should takes clients to consume that (i.e. no throttling) - is this correct?

[izacus]

Yeah, at the end of the day, the player is also downloading and caching chunks. Usually faster than playback as well - precaching ahead so line fluctuations don't make your video stutter.