With all due respect, you have no idea what you're talking about. I worked there during the transition from 3rd party CDNs to OpenConnect. We got off 3rd party CDNs in 2013/4 and operated solely out of OpenConnect, in large part because no 3rd party CDN was capable of serving our amount of video at any price, including Akamai. We weren't even streaming out of our own datacenter anymore by the time I started, and that was when streaming was still free with your DVD plan.

And your timeline is all wrong too. Netflix didn't even engage with the ISPs about bandwidth until long after moving out of our own datacenter. We started the OpenConnect program specifically to make it easier for ISPs, there was no bullying. The spat you're thinking of is that Comcast didn't want to adopt the OpenConnect but also didn't want to appropriately peer with other networks to give their customers the advertised speeds.

And hardware cost is a hugely relevant parameter. Being efficient with hardware is the difference between profitable streaming at that scale and not profitable.