This is what (sadly) puts a hole in the concept. Because most of the tyrant ISPs don't provide symmetric connections, you are never going to maintain a 1.0 ratio throughout a viewing, so you depend on seed boxes to keep the download demands from crippling popular videos. Unless they add a daemon option to keep seeding when not using the app, users are always leechers.
Not necessarily. It doesn't matter how much faster your download speed is as long as your upload speed is fast enough to "reverse stream". i.e. for a 700mb 1h40 movie your upload speed needs to be ~120kB/s, which most people have now (at least in the UK)
That is only if you always watch your movie start to finish. If you don't consume the whole film that number goes up dramatically, say if you watched 5 minutes at a 5MB/1MB connection, then you could download 1.5GB (probably half the movie) while only seeding 300MB back.