Bittorrent has innate support for content addressing, while HTTP is location-addressed: there is simply no way to decouple a content's location from its identity with HTTP. You can try to fake it, of course, with more indirection, but each hop requires communications with a specific location reachable with HTTP.
In fortunate circumstances, Bittorrent, it can run fully P2P without needing 'servers' -- depending on whether you have to holepunch a NAT, whether you're okay with peer discovery taking longer in the DHT without a tracker, and whether you're okay with no fallback webseed as a seed-of-last-resort. Magnet links, a distinct concept not only applicable to Bittorrent, are the cherry on top, which enable even the ".torrent" file (or rather, the equivalent information) to be found without having to possess the .torrent file itself, from just a hash.
BT's architecture has a nice effect that popular content consumes fewer of the original host's bandwidth than it would with HTTP, but this works best if peer interest roughly coincides in time. This is why it's a good fit for distributing patches [1][2], or newly released episodic content, and a fairly poor fit for anything else.
The Bittorrent extensions (BEPs) vary widly in quality, clarity, verbosity, and rigor, and aren't always up to the level of HTTP extensions acknowledged by the IETF. Most BEPs were implemented in only one product and then submitted as a BEP retroactively, while throughout its lifetime most of HTTP's enhancements were discussed and developed in a semi-open, but publicly viewable process in the IETF with more emphasis on consensus and early prototyping, rather than final implementation and retroactive standardization. These days this process has partially been subsumed by prominent vendors implementing a behavior, running it for an extended amount of time as a proprietary enhancement, then submitting a slightly altered version to the IETF for discussion, so admittedly the two enhancement processes are a lot more similar now than they've been in the past.
In fortunate circumstances, Bittorrent, it can run fully P2P without needing 'servers' -- depending on whether you have to holepunch a NAT, whether you're okay with peer discovery taking longer in the DHT without a tracker, and whether you're okay with no fallback webseed as a seed-of-last-resort. Magnet links, a distinct concept not only applicable to Bittorrent, are the cherry on top, which enable even the ".torrent" file (or rather, the equivalent information) to be found without having to possess the .torrent file itself, from just a hash.
BT's architecture has a nice effect that popular content consumes fewer of the original host's bandwidth than it would with HTTP, but this works best if peer interest roughly coincides in time. This is why it's a good fit for distributing patches [1][2], or newly released episodic content, and a fairly poor fit for anything else.
The Bittorrent extensions (BEPs) vary widly in quality, clarity, verbosity, and rigor, and aren't always up to the level of HTTP extensions acknowledged by the IETF. Most BEPs were implemented in only one product and then submitted as a BEP retroactively, while throughout its lifetime most of HTTP's enhancements were discussed and developed in a semi-open, but publicly viewable process in the IETF with more emphasis on consensus and early prototyping, rather than final implementation and retroactive standardization. These days this process has partially been subsumed by prominent vendors implementing a behavior, running it for an extended amount of time as a proprietary enhancement, then submitting a slightly altered version to the IETF for discussion, so admittedly the two enhancement processes are a lot more similar now than they've been in the past.
[1] http://arstechnica.com/business/2012/04/exclusive-a-behind-t... [2] http://wow.gamepedia.com/Blizzard_Downloader