I only watch at home, so clearly I'm not the right person to ask about accessibility.

Streaming though... It obviously depends on the userbase, but I have downloaded feature length videos faster through bittorrent than youtube took buffering the first minute.

Another idea - maybe a middle ground would be pre-leeching episodes. I will want to watch them eventually, so might as well download ahead of time. Best of both worlds. Actually... that's exactly the kind of thing that would kill a centralized service like youtube, but would make a torrent-based service fly.