Slightly unrelated, but did they ever consider P2P? It scales really well and saves Terabytes of bandwidth, so I wonder what the cons are, except that's it's associated with illegal distribution.
P2P doesn't offer as many experience consistency guarantees and in general adds a lot of complexity (=cost) that doesn't exist in a client server model. Even if you went full bore on P2P you still have to maintain a significant portion of the centralized infrastructure both to seed new content as well as for clients that aren't good P2P candidates (poor connections, limited asymmetric connections, heavily limited data connections). Once you got through all of those technical issues even if you found you could overall save cost by reducing the core infrastructure... it rides on the premise customers are going to be fine with their devices using their upload (both active bandwidth and total data) at the same price as when it was a hosted service.
But yes I imagine licensing is definitely an issue too. Right now only certain shows can be saved offline to a device and only for very restricted periods of time for the same reason. It's also worth noting in many cases Netflix doesn't pay for bandwidth.
It's already there. The piratebay already serves me movies at 200 MBps with almost zero infrastructure cost. It's probably more a licensing issue like you said.
It's "not already there" as what torrents do is not the same as what Netflix does even though both are related to media delivery. Try seeking on a torrent which only caches the local blocks and getting the same seek delay, try getting instant start and seek when 1 million people are watching a launch, try getting people to pay you the same amount to use their upload, try getting the same battery life on a torrent as a single HTTPS stream using burst intervals. As I said P2P doesn't offer as many experience consistency guarantees and has many other problems. Licensing is just one of many issues.
Of course for free many people are willing to live with starting and seeking being slow or battery life being worse or having to allocate the storage up front or using their upload and so on but again the question is can it fit in the cost offset of some of the centralized infrastructure not what you could do for free. I don't have anything against torrents, quite the opposite I am quite a heavy user of BOTH streaming services and torrenting due to DRM restrictions on quality for some of my devices, but it isn't a single issue problem like you are pressing to make it be.
Residential connections have much lower upload speeds than their download speed. That can impact web browsing speeds because outgoing packets can saturate the bandwidth and delay TCP handshake packets. This is a problem I've been having constantly with my Comcast internet connection. If the net feels slow, I check if something's doing some large upload despite that it's gigabit. I've tried QoS, managed switches etc, none helped the situation. P2P is a no-no from that perspective, in addition to other valid points until same up/down speeds become a norm (miss you Sonic!).
That's not P2P in quite the same sense of the above was talking about. Chromecast is client/server it's just your device can become the server or instruct the Chromecast to connect to a certain server.
