I think you're greatly underestimating how much more cumbersome torrenting is even compared to a plugin, especially for "normal" users who are not necessarily tech-savvy.
This argument is repeated ad nauseam but it’s false, all it takes is a torrenting app installed, that’s the only threshold.
But back to the point, if Netflix wouldn’t use DRM, it would change absolutely nothing since copyright infringement is still illegal and those DRM protections are completely useless.
Can my torrenting app stream my video, or do I have to wait for a full assembly of the pieces from torrent hosts and enough downloaded to watch it?
If the latter, torrenting is plenty cumbersome enough that if the studios are pushing movie-viewing to "Pay us money or you have to torrent it," they're winning.
Yes, and this functionality has been built into many of the largest torrenting programs out-of-the-box for quite some time now. In the case of µTorrent, it was added in version 3.0 all the way back in 2010.
Obviously, how quickly the stream will buffer depends entirely on the state of the swarm. Popular items will work almost immediately, while particularly unpopular items won't be streamable at all.
Anecdotally, I have personally witnessed my (very nontechnical) friends streaming 4+ GB 1080p ...popular cat videos... that weren't available from Netflix. They did not struggle with the process in the slightest.
I don't think it would, unless it begins playing within thirty seconds of the user choosing a video and provides an uninterrupted streaming experience?
Last I checked, the BitTorrent protocol didn't provide packet sorting that would allow for this behavior (by forcing the beginning of the movie's bytestream to be the first data downloaded), so my mistake if the protocol has improved and I was unaware it provided this service.
How easily, and how much setup is necessary? Remember, we're talking about competing with a service that doesn't even make the end-user consider whether that is a problem that needs to be solved (just plug in a credit card and off you go).
A coder spent an hour changing the code, once, and now it requires zero effort for users. They never know the difference. Open popcorn time and wait for it to quickly buffer.
