In short credit cards do not move value at all. You authorize payment instructions. Which in turn leads to balances being adjusted. It's basically a debt transaction instead of a value transaction. It has several advantages like that banks can adjust balances for a specific time with many parties and then calculate the effective difference (a lot will cancel each other out) and only settle the real differences. There is more of course but that's the basics.
For the consumer, streaming value doesn't need any kind of subscription. It doesn't even require a contract. You do not need to stream from netflix because that's what you already have an pay for monthly. You pay whoever gives you what you want. It's kinda like if you could use cash without the obvious downsides of physically moving coins and with the ability to split it in whatever fraction you'd like. Please watch the youtube video. He explains this way better than I could. It goes down to the level of IP data packages. Something similar could be made (is being made) with value.
>If I understand correctly, the current situation is that there are free services where you can upload/insert data, free services where you can download/consume—and there are paid services for both too.
Most of the content people access on the internet is "free" as in no need to pay for it other than pay for the internet access. Same is also true for "inserting" as in upload it somewhere. However physically inserting it (hosting) isn't free even if you find a free host it's just paid by someone else.
Hence hosting (inserting) costs while pulling is mostly free. Every other market works exactly the opposite way. You can't get an apple for free at any store. There is no way someone else is gonna pay the apple for you if you just look at some ads.
If the internet would work more like a store, some people would insert data and other people would access/download and they would pay for that directly not let someone else pay in exchange for horrible userexperiences, horrible privacy, huge additional traffic waste etc.
All of that could really only turn successful because data started moving freely over the internet and it grew exponentially while moving value basically has not changed at all.