Oh I see what you mean now. That would be seed-and-run.

That’s unethical as far as pirating goes…

I’m not sure I understand.

The users go to a streaming site, they look for a movie, they click the clicks, they watch the movie, they close the browser, the temporary files are deleted.

What downloads? What stored files?

That’s what steaming is (temporarily downloading), but if I’m not seeding, and neither are my fellow consumers, there’s no “peer-to-peer” to speak of.

I’ll mention it here, since nobody did for some reason, but torrenting is sustainable so long as people keep the files and reseed. So keeping a copy is not the end-goal of people using torrenting technology, but a necessary part of the process.

The goal, functionally, is still streaming. (So much so I used to set the torrent to download the file progressively and run the incomplete file in VLC, watching it while it was getting completed).

What keeps me away from streaming site is that I’m confused about how they sustain themselves. Aren’t the costs giganormous to constantly be streaming stuff around?

Let me stop you at “I’m no security expert”.