[theprotocol]

This is the most plausible outcome. Netflix wouldn't just leave that money on the table and the most obvious thing to do would be to provide the support they want from browsers themselves.

Users follow use cases and would not be averse to spending 30 seconds installing something in order to watch their favorite content.

There's also sort of a game theory situation with the removal of DRM, as it would be a competitive advantage being the only one that supports it.

[bad_user]

All Netflix movies are on PirateBay already, in spite of their DRM. I’ve seen movies pop up on PirateBay the day they are released. They wouldn’t leave any money on the table.

People paying for Netflix are paying for convenience. That wouldn’t change in absence of DRM.

[theprotocol]

I think you're greatly underestimating how much more cumbersome torrenting is even compared to a plugin, especially for "normal" users who are not necessarily tech-savvy.

[bad_user]

This argument is repeated ad nauseam but it’s false, all it takes is a torrenting app installed, that’s the only threshold.

But back to the point, if Netflix wouldn’t use DRM, it would change absolutely nothing since copyright infringement is still illegal and those DRM protections are completely useless.

[fixermark]

Can my torrenting app stream my video, or do I have to wait for a full assembly of the pieces from torrent hosts and enough downloaded to watch it?

If the latter, torrenting is plenty cumbersome enough that if the studios are pushing movie-viewing to "Pay us money or you have to torrent it," they're winning.

[Reelin]

> Can my torrenting app stream my video

Yes, and this functionality has been built into many of the largest torrenting programs out-of-the-box for quite some time now. In the case of µTorrent, it was added in version 3.0 all the way back in 2010.

Obviously, how quickly the stream will buffer depends entirely on the state of the swarm. Popular items will work almost immediately, while particularly unpopular items won't be streamable at all.

Anecdotally, I have personally witnessed my (very nontechnical) friends streaming 4+ GB 1080p ...popular cat videos... that weren't available from Netflix. They did not struggle with the process in the slightest.

[radisb]

Pop-Corn Time would like to have a word with you

[fixermark]

I don't think it would, unless it begins playing within thirty seconds of the user choosing a video and provides an uninterrupted streaming experience?

Last I checked, the BitTorrent protocol didn't provide packet sorting that would allow for this behavior (by forcing the beginning of the movie's bytestream to be the first data downloaded), so my mistake if the protocol has improved and I was unaware it provided this service.