the reason...
I've been struggling with figuring out the best way to stream usenet content for a long time. There are several approaches which I'll briefly explain as it ties into my desire to be able to scan .strm files.
The first problem is how one is to get files and feed them to xbmc. The more popular request is to somehow tie an NZB downloader (like sabnzbd) to xbmc's ability to play incomplete RAR sets. A different, easier method is to simply make use of easynews' autounrar files. There's upsides and downsides to both and Ed Bortoni actually did make an easynews streamer script at one time, although it didn't have the functionality I'm looking for.
So, the big problem is this. If you have 200 days worth of juicy good usenet content that you want to have organized in a nice, coherent manner, how do you do that? As I mulled over the question I keep coming back to the fact that one of xbmc's big features is its media organization and presentation. With all that said, one fairly simple approach to the whole problem is to use a few sites as reference (newzbin/nzbmatrix/etc + easynews) in order to create a database of the content which has nice normalized naming and categorization of the content. Use that DB to create the folder/file structure for all of the TV and movie content with .strm files representing the video's themselves, and let xbmc do the scanning in order to pull the info data from imdb and thetvdb.
Unfortunately, it'd be vastly more popular if it was an NZB based solution, but as far as I can tell, that would require creating a nice interface to the huge amount of content. I was trying to see if I could solve the problem while making the best use of xbmc's built in capability.