It is a thing.
For livestreams there's AceStream built on BitTorrent, but I think it's closed-source. They do have some SDK but I never looked into it. It's mostly used by IPTV pirates. I've used it a few times and it's hit-or-miss but when it works well I have been able to watch livestreams in HD/FullHD without cuts. Latency is always very bad though.
Then for video-on-demand there are some web-based ones like PeerTube (FOSS) and I think BitChute? Sadly webtorrent is very limited.