> Reed Hastings announced that the company was expanding into almost every country around the world — including markets with subpar broadband infrastructure and consumers who primarily accessed the internet from their mobile phone.

The optimistic take here is that the purpose of this encoding work is to make Netflix accessible consumers in ALL countries- not consumers with beefy internet.

IMO the realistic take is that Netflix knows it can do this while saving $$$ serving lower quality video to consumers who cant tell the difference.