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.)
Re:Netflix Downloads
by logicallee on Wednesday November 30, 2016 @11:39AM
(#13072143)
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?
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.