I know Bittorrent is often used for illegal downloading and whatnot, but I mostly use it on the rare occasion to download things like Linux distributions. Many of these download sources let you download from HTTP, possibly FTP, and they also provide a .torrent file.
I encountered one of these earlier today, and I naturally hit the torrent file, since it typically downloads faster through BT and also reduces the load on the web server. But, my Bittorrent program couldn't find very many seeds/peers, so I had to resort to HTTP. After a few minutes of downloading, Bittorrent finally kicked in with a load of seeds and peers, and I canceled the HTTP download, since the BT speeds ramped up and would quickly surpass the HTTP-downloaded amount.
So I thought, what if a Bittorrent client would accept not only a .torrent file, but also one or more HTTP/FTP download locations? It could then be smart about downloading from Bittorrent seeds and peers, while simultaneously downloading chunks of the file from the HTTP and FTP download locations. It's an odd hybrid between a "download accelerator" and a Bittorrent client.
Is there any sort of program out there that does this?