They could do that but you deeplink back into the Netflix app to actually watch to solve the DRM issue. Which I think shows that it's about more than just DRM. They want to control the experience.
DRM doesn't effectively keep you from finding everything anyway, and much DRM is flimsy, easy-to-bypass pro forma DRM; because DRM -is- about controlling the experience, first and foremost.
Its sheer presence activates the DMCA felony protection of circumventing copyright. This is why Cory Doctorow always calls copyright evasion "felony contempt of business model". It's there so the company can control the experience and squash any attempt to bypass that control; in that sense, the DRM on the UX is more important than the DRM on the content itself.
Obligatory Cory Doctorow "Unauthorized Bread" link: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/01/unauthorized-bread-a-...
If they ever have any hope of improving margins, they need to argue that “our curation drives content discovery” to get better deals out of content providers.
As a producer/show runner, who would you rather make a series for, Netflix or a streaming service you've never heard of? Which would you accept less money upfront from?
Suppose you choose Netflix to fund your philosophical sci-fi show? Netflix tell you they will put it at the top of the main menu for everyone who's ever watched the new Star Trek as long as you agree to X. Do you agree to X?
It wouldn’t be until years later until I understood the Simpson paradox and that a/b testing improves the mean of whatever metric you’re trying to improve, usually by decreasing some important segment and improving some unimportant segment.
That is, it's less about "metrics up, other unmeasured metrics down" and more "we're up in all subgroups, so we never noticed that our numbers across when we combine the subgroups are down."