There wa a discusion about a year ago about the pros/cons of both downloads & streaming
Some people seemed to feel that FLASH tended to help rebills, and cut down on sharing
http://www.gfy.com/showthread.php?t=849666
Personally I haven't seem a streaming flash player yet that wasn't jerky stop & go. At least with some of the other formats you could just wait until the file downloaded 100% and hit replay.