Torrents have one crucial disadvantage: they require you to make the content publicly available in the process, which is illegal in many countries. It is much better to download it, which is not illegal in most jurisdictions, with one notable exception of proprietary software.

The alternative is servers that get hammered during downloads, as opposed to swarms where the download health improves when more people use it.

The current ecosystem dealt with the problem of hammering by using various filehosters and most of them are DMCA-compliant. But the window between the release and the file being DMCAed is large enough for this business to thrive. This whole system works by providing value to 3 key parties:

* filehosters - they get money from subscribers (some offer a free crippled options just to frustrate users into buying the subscription) * uploaders - they got money from filehosters * downloaders - they got the content they need

There are private trackers.

What's a private tracker?

The better trackers are invite only. If you are found to be selling invites your entire invite tree will be banned. You have to be recruited or personally know a member to get in.

Take for example PTP. It is one of the best movie trackers. It recently exceeded 250,000 unique titles available in many different formats. Netflix in contrast only has 15,000 unique titles and their library is shrinking not growing.

E.g. iptorrents.com. You pay for access (or have to be invited) to a catalog of torrents that are not publicly-available. You must disable the DHT and peer discovery features of your bittorrent client so that the file content is only seeded back to other members

Not true; you can disable uploading in various torrent clients.

So, how does it work now? Last time I checked this was called "leeching" and fought against. Also, if everyone is doing that, it makes the whole protocol meaningless.