The second part of the Torrentbot story was going to be just as exciting, but my Gaim installation has broken so I can't quite finish it off.
Basically, I was going to write a Perl plugin for Gaim that would listen for messages from torrentbot@jabber.org, extract the torrent URL, then open up btdownloadcurses (the command line BitTorrent client) in xterm to automatically start downloading the show. It would be Tivo-like, in a way, with the benefit that everyone would be swarming at the same time so the download speed should be decent.
If anyone who uses Gaim wants to write that simple plugin, I'd be very impressed.