"Value" is a very personal thing, though. You may find something is great value for money, and others may not, and neither is wrong.

Personally, I don't find that the streaming services are good value. I don't complain about it, though. I just don't subscribe to them.

Also, buying services doesn't satisfy the "shopping as a recreational activity" itch. A big part of the recreation is the actual shopping, and coming home with physical stuff.

Eh it was great value when it was just Netflix or just two services but now I feel like there's often only 0-1 shows on a given platform that I'm interested in at any one time. It isn't "good value" to pay $15+ a month each for Netflix/Prime/Disney/HBO/Hulu/AppleTV and only use one or two of them in a given month. Because Prime Video is bundled with regular Amazon Prime I keep that active and activate and deactivate the others based on when they come out with seasons of shows I care to watch. I also think a lot of complaints are about the platforms increasingly making the experience worse like making me pay to remove ads when I'm already paying for the service, or what Netflix is pulling with their family plans.

I think it depends. All else being equal in terms of your daily commute, owning a big and expensive car is often seen as better than owning a more affordable smaller car.

If you consider "the value delivered" to be the totality of all the content on the platforms, then sure. But that's not actually valuable to most of the people subscribing, so it's ultimately a useless way of looking at it.

Any given person is only going to care about some small fraction of the media available for watching, and when that fraction is spread out across 6 different streaming services, the "value" they're getting from any single one of those is fairly small.

Furthermore, similar to what ldhough says, many of us remember when we could get basically all that content on Netflix, and we know perfectly well that a) the content providers could be making reasonable amounts of money through a streaming deal like that, and b) the reason they decided to launch their own service is one part insatiable desire for ever increasing profit, one part unrelenting crusade for absolute control over everything they own. Nowhere in there is "value to the customer".

There's a quote that I've seen go 'round a few times, to the effect of "the streaming services really need to remember that their entire value proposition is being slightly more convenient than piracy."

Because the ones who enjoy paying for them do not complain so you believe the complainers are a majority.