file sharing: Your premise is incorrect, you can stream them as well.
streaming service: If you figure out which service to use. If the service that has them is available in your region. And has that movie with your preferred language. And with your preferred subtitle language.
Only if all points are checked do streaming services become more convenient… mostly. There are then also companies like Netflix or Amazon who like making it as hard as possible to watch something compared to pirating it (hyperbole, yes. But also with quite some truth to it, at least for TV shows, I don’t watch movies)
> file sharing: Your premise is incorrect, you can stream them as well.
Of sorts, when there's enough excess bandwidth available that fairness doesn't really matter. By design bittorrent randomizes download order to improve the ability of peers to be of mutual interest to enable tit-for-tat.
That is possible, I have never used this feature. Though I’d guess that something new or old enough for it to matter, can’t download fast enough to keep up with a stream anyway.
> file sharing: Your premise is incorrect, you can stream them as well.
Doesn't BitTorrent download the file in random order, instead of from beginning to end? I thought there was a good reason why it had to do that. I thought the only alternative was centralisation.
It's usually not a (fully) random order, but rather the least-available (from other peers) parts get prioritised, to ensure maximum overall throughput. e.g. if 10 clients have the first part, but only 2 have the second part, it will prefer to download the second part first if possible.
But as the other replies say, your client can request any part it wishes. A few clients doing this won't have a significant effect on the overall throughput. Even if most clients were doing this, it would mostly only result in slightly lower download speeds overall.
The exception is for torrents with very few seeders, where this can have a much worse effect, but you are unlikely to be able to stream those sequentially at a reasonable speed anyway.
streaming service: If you figure out which service to use. If the service that has them is available in your region. And has that movie with your preferred language. And with your preferred subtitle language.
Only if all points are checked do streaming services become more convenient… mostly. There are then also companies like Netflix or Amazon who like making it as hard as possible to watch something compared to pirating it (hyperbole, yes. But also with quite some truth to it, at least for TV shows, I don’t watch movies)