> I don't understand why streaming from Netflix gives a worse picture than playing a torrent Because Netflix is conserving bandwidth by sending you a lower-bit

> I don't understand why streaming from Netflix gives a worse picture than playing a torrent Because Netflix is conserving bandwidth by sending you a lower-bitrate stream, while the pirated copy is — for movies at least — very likely a pirated copy of some offline release, e.g. BluRay, which comes with higher bitrate.