Torrented movies are better in pretty much every regard as compared to DVD/BluRay. No ads, no unskippable videos telling you not to pirate the disc you just bought, no 2 minute unskippable disc title intro, etc. Double click the file and it plays the movie.
That's worth paying for. I'd pay for that over Disks in the mail from Amazon if it were possible to do so. If there was a service that let me paste in a .torrent, pay $10, and have them forward it to the studio, life would be good.
Instead, we get iTunes, which somehow manages to make the movie watching process more painful than DVDs.
This is sort of a holy grail of distributed computing because it could allow people to elastically donate their storage similarly to how people donate their CPU cycles to Folding@Home or GPU cycles to BTC mining. The idea is that a lot of your CPU cycles (for example) are wasted because you aren't doing anything on your computer, so you can donate those cycles to Folding@Home. You could do something similar with RAM, but RAM is different: if I decide to run a program and start using my CPU cycles again Folding@Home can just push computation to another machine. But if I decide to reclaim RAM from a distributed computing system to run a program on my machine, then whatever the system was storing in RAM is lost, and if they need that, they a) need to have it duplicated elsewhere, and b) need to know how to retrieve it efficiently from a network of computers any of which may or may not actually have the data. This has proven to be a very hard problem to solve in practice.
From an end user perspective it sucks, but like others have mentioned there are lots of FOSS alternatives, I'd wager Transmission is the most popular.