Indeed. And the model makes this very clear too. On Netflix there is a button 'watch', while on iTunes and many others, the button says 'buy', 'purcase' etc. One implies a transaction, the other implies using already accessible content.
I doubt it is EOL. There is demand for "owning", so there is a business-model there. It might be shrinking or changing, but at least for a niche, it will stay.
For example e-books. I try to buy as many from the authors (or their publishers) themselves. Surprising how often an author sells their book themselves. DRM-free, almost always cheaper. Owned-by-me. As opposed to e.g. my "kobo", which I cannot backup and download for that inevitable moment that Rakuten/Kobo decides to close my account, "pivot" or stop offering services.
I’m reminded of a parody report noting Netflix was trialing a “browse only” plan, so you and your partner can argue endlessly about what to watch, but never have to make a choice.
And crucially, from the consumer's perspective, this isn't unreasonable. Unless you watch only rarely, you probably aren't paying anything like the full market price of a permanent copy of each movie or TV show you watch on Netflix, just as in days gone by you paid much less when you rented a movie on tape from the video store instead of buying. You might rationally prefer to pay a smaller amount for library-style access to a large pool of content for a certain period rather than the full purchase price of every specific piece of content you watch, and in that case, the deal is in your interests as well as Netflix's. Now, if a supplier started charging around the same amount as a full purchase would have cost but still strongly restricted the associated use of the content, that would start to look abusive.
