For streaming, being able to send file pieces sequentially is essential. In my experience, I’ve never gotten peers to send pieces quickly enough to stream a 720p/1080p video without interruption. Since most consumer broadband in the USA focus on download with low upload speeds, it doesn’t work well for Bittorrent. Maybe in Europe or other countries where broadband speeds are much better, you can have residents help upload data. I still think companies like Netflix need centralized data centers with high upload speeds to be able to stream using Bittorrent.

Forget about live streaming… remember Project Maelstrom?  I was very excited about the prospects of live streaming, Bittorrent was just not designed to handle the immediate data you need for streaming nor handling skipping of videos.

For pre-recorded content, I think Bittorent is a great option.  For live streaming, I don’t think Bittorrent handles this use case very well.