The 2 year contracts are really just payment plans in disguise (sometimes there isn't even interest!); I'm not sure there is any major provider that wants your phone back after your contract is up. (I have personally not had a cell phone contract in over a decade.) This is a relatively recent change, within the last 5 years or so. Back in the day, yeah, you were just renting your phone. (And the same might be true of your wired ISP. You definitely don't own your CPE unless you made some special deal.)
Netflix vs. buying physical media is not clearly an ownership thing. A year's worth of Netflix's middle-tier plan buys you 9 DVDs. (Actually, I don't think they make DVDs anymore, so BluRay or something.) So if you were going to watch more than one film a month, you come out ahead there.
I thought about amending my earlier comment to mention apples iPhone subscription service. It's still a rent to own thing, but the trend here is clear: people don't really care about owning, they care about being able to afford the benefit of using the device at the most affordable upfront cost.
Anecdotally, I don't know a single person who has bought a DVD in years. And when people do buy media, they don't buy a disk but a digital license to the media on a store.
Another example? Gabe Newell famously said piracy is a convenience issue. People will pay for convenience. It's also why furniture rental companies (like Feather) are proliferating versus closing up shop. Flexibility is king, and ownership is the opposite of flexibility, it is liability.
