One difference is that a little upfront work to download the movie is approximately 500 infinities better than the thing glitching out or stopping during playback either due to the streaming platform or your "99.99%" ISP deciding to have its monthly 5 minutes of downtime during the movie.
And then you have stuff like the streaming platform refusing to play because you don't have the absolute latest browser or drivers.
Content is also spread across a dozen streaming platforms, and a lot of back catalog is hardly available too.. so what you say works within the confines of the subscriptions you have.
I've certainly witnessed people going down a rabbit hole of trying to figure out which platform still has the content they want, getting sent on a goose chase from outdated information, only to just give up and torrent it.
Video quality on the torrents is mixed but it's also mixed on the streaming platforms-- both between the platforms and due to bandwidth management on the platforms. With torrents you have file size ~= quality so you have a pretty good idea what you're going to get. Streaming platforms, or at least the ones I'm familiar with (other than youtube) don't seem to give you any direct control of your bandwidth usage. So if you want lower quality to conserve resources you may not be able to get it.
I think the instant catalog in streaming might also cause some people to suffer from choice peristalsis. I've seen people just scroll long enough on netflix that after a bit they don't have time to watch a movie anymore.
I dunno how much I'd argue that it's superior, but it's certainly different and I think it's easy to understand how someone might prefer one or the other.
One test of your conjecture might be: Do people with all-you-can-eat access to a streaming platform ever torrent content that they could just watch on that platform? -- They do.
We only use the Apple TV device, and we don't see most of these issues. Quality is good, playback starts immediately and rarely glitches, search spans (almost, Netflix doesn't participate) every service we have access to.
It's possible my tastes are too vanilla or I'm blowing way too much $$$ on streaming services, but I rarely have any trouble finding exactly what I want to watch.
And then you have stuff like the streaming platform refusing to play because you don't have the absolute latest browser or drivers.
Content is also spread across a dozen streaming platforms, and a lot of back catalog is hardly available too.. so what you say works within the confines of the subscriptions you have.
I've certainly witnessed people going down a rabbit hole of trying to figure out which platform still has the content they want, getting sent on a goose chase from outdated information, only to just give up and torrent it.
Video quality on the torrents is mixed but it's also mixed on the streaming platforms-- both between the platforms and due to bandwidth management on the platforms. With torrents you have file size ~= quality so you have a pretty good idea what you're going to get. Streaming platforms, or at least the ones I'm familiar with (other than youtube) don't seem to give you any direct control of your bandwidth usage. So if you want lower quality to conserve resources you may not be able to get it.
I think the instant catalog in streaming might also cause some people to suffer from choice peristalsis. I've seen people just scroll long enough on netflix that after a bit they don't have time to watch a movie anymore.
I dunno how much I'd argue that it's superior, but it's certainly different and I think it's easy to understand how someone might prefer one or the other.
One test of your conjecture might be: Do people with all-you-can-eat access to a streaming platform ever torrent content that they could just watch on that platform? -- They do.