I don't think there's anything really wrong with that, per se ... but I'd encourage people to use torrents over that, in general.

Gotwoot uses a ton of bandwidth already, much of it on the back-end side, serving as animeone's work dump (which also eats about 55 gigs of disk space) and as the torrent tracker. The forums and image gallery aren't exactly lightweight on the bandwidth side either. I don't think it'd be a good idea for us to get into the direct downloads game.

I sorta like the preview idea, but ... if you're going to be spending hours torrenting the first episode or the promo for a show, you've got other problems. More to the point, we'd have to reencode the video to make it compatible with that (ie: pick a representative chunk of a show, encode it in flash video format). Sounds like a bit more hassle than it's worth, considering many series release promo videos that typically weigh in in the 25-50 meg category (look for "episode 0" -- we aren't tracking any of those right now though).

Besides, direct downloads encourage a sense of entitlement. Torrents foster the idea that you're not just leeching, you're participating in the swarm, and reward you for contributing. I think there's some value to that.