Whenever I rent a movie off iTunes, it will fail 2GB in complaining about data corruption. Then it restarts the download. A younger naive me used to give it a 2nd/3rd chance to complete the download but now I turn to torrents with the justification that I already bought the right to watch it.

Netflix/Hulu/Google/Youtube is very reliable and high quality but their library is lacking. It's a shame they don't seem to have the selection Apple does. Compared to any of their libraries, Amazon Instant is more of a bookshelf so I haven't given its streaming reliability a shot yet.

My roommate's family has HBO, so he has an account to watch HBO. But instead we torrent Game of Thrones every Sunday because the video quality is better and there's no risk of buffering interruptions. It's annoying enough for me but this is becoming a small social event and I would gladly pay $5-10 (or I guess break the law) for a guaranteed quality viewing experience for guests.

There really is no legal equivalent to torrents in terms of selection or quality. If there was I would pay for it, like I do for music.