Netflix isn't necessarily trying to reduce the bandwidth on _their_ side. They want to be able to deliver higher quality to users on lower bandwidth connections. The better that goes, the larger their prospective customer base.

That's a big issue in rural areas with microwave links. Everyone who has one of these links is limited by bandwidth and they all want to watch Netflix.

I wonder if there's a market for a "Netflix ISP" - essentially setting up an antenna for local WAN and a microwave antenna, and then asking Netflix for one of their caching appliances.

Bandwidth can be cheap, all depending on the connection you're using. It can also be extremely expensive:

[ Dutch ] https://www.telegraaf.nl/vrij/2167192/zoontje-duitsers-kijkt...

If your Dutch isn't up to this let me summarise: A German family took a boat trip from Kiel to Oslo. Their 12yo son watched a few movies (or clips, no idea) while on board. Total data consumption was 470 MB. They got a bill for €12.000,- which comes down to just over €25 per MB.

Bandwidth can be very expensive as well. Of course this is an extreme case but any byte shaved off an encoded stream can end up saving some people a lot of money.

For you, perhaps, it's cheap. For the use cases they are talking about, it's expensive and limited.

Agreed that, if all they can do is shave a "few kB" off a video, it's probably not worth the investment. But what if they can buy a 5–10% bandwidth improvement that actually looks better on the device they're targeting?