About the fair pricing: Would love to have this also for my car lease ;) But more on a weekly bases.
The flip side of that is that only a small fraction of their members could actively use their memberships or they wouldn't have enough space. The active members get their membership effectively subsidized by people who don't use their memberships.
Apparently up to 50% of a gym's sign-ups happen in the month of January due to new years resolutions, and January/February are the busiest months as a result, though the majority keep their membership even after their resolve to go tapers off.
Whereas Netflix and other streaming? It's so easy to just stay in and binge watch. The logical thing to do is cancel when you aren't using it to avoid paying year round, but they bank on the combination of laziness (takes effort to cancel) and ease of use - if you watch even just once or twice a month it starts seeming worthwhile.
And I'd bet most users still make them money. There's a huge fixed cost to setting up a giant content streaming service like Netflix, and to acquiring their content catalog, but they've hyper optimized the distribution so I'd expect all but the heaviest users make them money. And with ad supported plans, watching more would mean they get to serve more ads and make even more money.
I think that depends on your country. I’ve never had an issue cancelling my gym membership.
I see lots of short rentals that just idle on the street for days sometimes. Here the provider pays of course (and I assume it’s not in their interest).
When you plan ahead, it's manageable. Sometimes, a car for renting is not available long term because people plan for the same time (e.g. holidays) and the provider doesn't have big enough car fleet to cover these peaks.
When you have an unexpected trip though, e.g. suddenly needing to go to Ikea, a spur-of-the-moment trip, etc., that's when this all falls apart. In my town, this was then 40:60, favoring no cars being available.
In the end, I just bought a car. 5 days out of the week, it sits on the street and depreciates in value. We take it on trips for the weekends, though, and have been absolutely loving it.
[0] central Europe, don't really need a car for daily life, but it's nice to have sometimes