A friend who doesn't live close had one season of a series I wanted to watch and I could stream it from his Plex. I'm not saying this could not have been solved in another easy way, but it worked without friction because he had Plex anyway.

I'm kinda over downloading gigabytes of files and then deleting them after watching. And I'm not doing this regularly so I've not investigated. All I'm saying is that it solved a problem nicely.