^ DRM is absolutely positively mandatory - no two ways about it. You simply will not get the rights to distribute content if you don't have approved DRM implementations, and this is extremely specific e.g hardware implementations of PlayReady, Widevine with progressive restrictions to unlock HD or UHD content.
I don't love DRM, but it's just table stakes when you're delivering premium content. There's no way around it, so the best we can do is make it as unobtrusive as possible!
Regarding the 200 - 300 Kbps scenario - another use case would be rural customers with satellite or very poor cell service. I grew up in a very small town and many of my friends live outside the city limits where there simply is no broadband. Not even DSL, though you could maybe get an ISDN or T1 line if you're a masochist
You might get one bar of LTE (or two if you stand in exactly the right place), and you're sharing this one solitary tower with your neighbors, so during peak times you're lucky to get 1 Mbps, assuming you're not over your data cap, at which point you drop down to under 500 Kbps. Satellite can be fast, but generally is very over-sold in these areas, and cannot keep up with demand during peak times. It also has extreme data caps, and the throttled speed is extremely slow.
Anyway - hoping we can get back on topic - AOM codec discussion
Maybe viewing through the ultra low bitrate lens, has anyone done very low bitrate 2 pass VBR tests with AV1? I'd be interested to see how that might fit into the above scenario regarding downloading content for offline playback. This is a neat scenario because you get the bonus of being able to skip all the compromises one must make when encoding for adaptive bitrate delivery and can use very large buffers (vbv-maxrate + vbv-bufsize) and longer adaptive keyframe intervals.