This is true for amateurs encoding video files to be pirated, but for the mega corps, sending more bits costs more money.

Many years ago, I had a couple drinks with a guy from Netflix who worked on their video compression processes, and he fully convinced me they're squeezing every last drop out of every bit they send down the pipes. The quality is not great compared to some other streaming services, but it's actually kind of amazing how they're able to get away with serving such tiny files.

Anyway, I think we can expect these companies to mostly max out the resultant video quality of their bitstreams, and showing the average bitrate of their pricing tiers would be a great yardstick for consumers.