Slightly unrelated, but did they ever consider P2P? It scales really well and saves Terabytes of bandwidth, so I wonder what the cons are, except that's it's associated with illegal distribution.
But yes I imagine licensing is definitely an issue too. Right now only certain shows can be saved offline to a device and only for very restricted periods of time for the same reason. It's also worth noting in many cases Netflix doesn't pay for bandwidth.
It's already there. The piratebay already serves me movies at 200 MBps with almost zero infrastructure cost. It's probably more a licensing issue like you said.
Of course for free many people are willing to live with starting and seeking being slow or battery life being worse or having to allocate the storage up front or using their upload and so on but again the question is can it fit in the cost offset of some of the centralized infrastructure not what you could do for free. I don't have anything against torrents, quite the opposite I am quite a heavy user of BOTH streaming services and torrenting due to DRM restrictions on quality for some of my devices, but it isn't a single issue problem like you are pressing to make it be.
For some internal distributed action Netflix has made IPFS into something they can use but not for end delivery https://blog.ipfs.io/2020-02-14-improved-bitswap-for-contain...