Simple: You'd have to install a plugin or a separate special app to watch video, like the bad old days of RealPlayer.
Users follow use cases and would not be averse to spending 30 seconds installing something in order to watch their favorite content.
There's also sort of a game theory situation with the removal of DRM, as it would be a competitive advantage being the only one that supports it.
People paying for Netflix are paying for convenience. That wouldn’t change in absence of DRM.
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.
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.
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.
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.
How is that different from the current state of EME plugins? Other than that proprietary browsers ship with the most popular plugins installed.
DRM is not illegitimate. It just sucks and operates in a way that is immune to free market competition - the reasons for that immunity are the true thing to fix. Users should have alternatives as there is a clear market there. If DRM is so bad, then that's what should kill it.