But in all seriousness: are there any numbers we can refer to for the economics of this? It sounds like it could be similar to the issues around royalties paid by music streaming services.
I was going to say that this looks a lot more like expedience ("hey, we've got this version of Some Terrible Straight To DVD Movie stored in 4:3 SD 8Mb/s MPEG-2, let's send 'em that!") but both examples are a) relatively high profile and b) not 4:3 pan/scan crops. They look to be cropped to 16:9, which is weird, and makes me think that it's happening inside Netflix's video pipeline.
Electrolytes?
But in all seriousness: are there any numbers we can refer to for the economics of this? It sounds like it could be similar to the issues around royalties paid by music streaming services.