Hesitated a lot about this, and finally thought "fuck it, let's do it".
I think it's like people working in porn: they don't necessarily enjoy the industry, but at one point they thought "man, there's really something that needs to be done".
I'd much prefer a legal solution. I'd much prefer content owners to expose APIs for the licensing of their content, and have them let us create the front-ends.
Why not link people to an Amazon link, or netflix, or iTunes, for films which are available at those places?
Because they so clearly suck at both UI and content distribution.
I don't want to jump through hoops to watch a movie. And no I don't want to wait for the release window to clear.
I want you to give me the rights to get it by my owns mean, because I know how to do it better than you. Just let me pay for the damn thing: I got money, I'll pay for all I want to watch.
On Amazon for example, you click the "Buy Movie" button, and it turns into a play button, which launches the movie player. As long as you're signed in, there are no intermediate steps, the purchase just goes to your default credit card or bank account and you get an e-mail receipt while you're already watching the movie.
It's not that different anywhere else if you're already signed in, which many people will be.
You haven't really answered the question of why you don't "let me pay for the damn thing" by linking to these stores for the movies available there. If you're only interested in helping people pirate movies even if they're cheaply and easily available to them online already, just come out and say it.
Yup, life sucks for movie lovers in Europe.
Torrented files have none of these arbitrary restrictions.
Also, I find my tracker has a better download speed than any of these services (though that's not really an important point.)
Sure, I'm on an awesome tracker, and I can download an HD movie to my seedbox within 5 minutes. No problem. Then I just stream it over my home connection (which is rather slow.) So there's a 5-10 minute delay, which I can live with. But, if somebody would offer me an insta-HD-streaming feature (Netflix doesn't count, I'm in Europe,) I'd pay for that.
But nobody does, so I torrent.
They intentionally bury it, though, because 'play now' is their premium offering (a shady business model imho). You have to go to the torrent's files, right click the .avi/.mkv/.mp4, go to 'Media server' -> 'Copy stream URI to clipboard', and then you can use that stream URI in any self-respecting player (VLC, mplayer).
That's terrible UX though :)
(Small note: in-order download is generally frowned upon in the torrent world, becaues it's bad for a torrent's health. However, Vuze manages this nicely by both prioritizing the pieces in order and still downloading/seeding random pieces at the same time. I think it's a very good compromise.)