Right, thinking about it, it could still work with very popular things like TV series. You release the whole season with bit-torrent to save bandwidth and marketing costs. Then after watching the first two episodes you have to pay for the rest. Sure there's no tech for that today, but hey startup idea!
Isn't this kind of what they're doing on Google Play, or what was done with Mr. Robot, minus the torrent? The first episode or two are free, then you either pay per episode or watch via TV subscription. I frequently download free pilot episodes to see if there are any shows I might be interested in watching. I would say that Mr. Robot was a great example of this. I heard about the show by word of mouth (it might have been here, or possibly on Reddit). I do not watch any other shows on USA, so it is likely that I would have never heard of the show had I not had the pilot recommended to me and easily available to watch on YouTube. I think that last part is key. I probably would not have made the effort to download a "USA" app, or jump through hoops to watch it on a web browser. Having it easily available on my phone where I could watch it with the built in YouTube app was perfect.
My idea is that you share the whole season with "friends" on torrent and other file-sharing sites. Not only the free episodes. You download the entire season! This takes care of both distribution and most of the marketing. You of-course release it with the highest quality! And you do not need any infrastructure whatsoever to do this.
As in the spirit of shareware, you let people watch some of the episodes for free, then charge for the rest. And that's the part some smart people has to figure out.
An idea is to have the content encoded differently depending on the Internet routes. And some type of block-chain that would give you a key to decode the data, depending on a voucher code you insert to the chain.
There absolutely exists tech to do this now. Someone with access to google to knock together a prototype today.
The issue is trust and control. The rights holders (not always the same people as the content creators) don't trust the consumer and want to retain control.
