What price do you pay for convenience? You could get anything for free on the Internet, if you tried hard enough. But people pay for subscription services anyways. People could go to the grocery store and buy ingredients for all of their food, yet they go to fast food stores or heat up frozen meals. While paying for convenience may save time, the price might not just be monetary - it may also affect health, wellness, or attention span. As the body gets used to its desires being met immediately, it starts to wear away. There really is nothing like doing it yourself.
Streaming services offer a constant flow of entertainment that is easily accessible and has little downtime. The cost? A monthly or yearly subscription of course, but also your perception of media. The on-demand nature of consuming media is a far cry from the past, where that media had to be physically acquired. Streaming services are also a more efficient, and convenient, way of distributing entertainment to people, but at the added cost of the consumer's ownership. The consume doesn't own anything after paying for a subscription, just limited access to a library of endless entertainment.
Amazon Prime offers free delivery on any order. Why go to the store when you could tap a button and have the same item delivered to your door the next day? The same could go for food delivery. The delivery driver saves you time and gas, but that time and gas is instead spent delivering your food by another person. The time you gain from that momentary weakness of having to physically do something yourself is time lost elsewhere, and money gone from your pocket.
I don't want to make anyone feel guilty for taking advantage of these services. The entire history of the human race is a story of laziness, of trying to make our lives easier. The Internet is an incredible invention filled with horrors and wonders of human ingenuity; however, the capitalistic nature of our society tends to try to back consumers into a corner without them realizing it. I think it's important to consider why these corporations try to make everything so easy. Of course, the primary reason is to drain our wallets. They make more money off of our desire for convenience. But there is a larger cost than that: your force of will.
Humans have the incredible power to shape the world around them by shaping themselves. Convenience, when used properly, momentarily allows us to forget the needs of our corporeal forms and focus entirely on our creative outlets. Convenience, when used as a weapon, can make us forget that power. When we grow too reliant on services that operate to profit off of us, it can be like a mold growing on our minds. Our skills atrophy and we forget what it was really like to live without those services. Humans used to speak to each other across large distances without the Internet, after all. So once in a while, it might be beneficial to remember that instead of paying for someone else to do something for you, do it yourself.