I think it may be the other way around. With the right curated lists of content, it would be more worthwhile to stream instead of downloading everything.
Those same enthusiastic people are still there steady growing the community. NV was definitely a service that people wanted and were passionate about. If you could pick and choose what TV shows, Movies or any other media were available to you out of the whole catalog of what was out there right now, I'm sure that most people would have paid a subscription to a commercially available service if it was available.
It wouldn't have been allowed to dominate, it would have still been forced to close some sort of way. Before NV, there was Stage6 that provided the same high quality service and it closed up shop.