I think a lot of this comes from how the internet in many ways has become less of a shared place, with fewer people self hosting and more moving to ‘platforms’ which has enabled massive commercialization (and an excessive desire to mine personal data, only to get hacked)
I’d assume the subscription would be for a webcam enabled doorbell with cloud storage of the video (which is probably designed in intentionally, because I don’t believe the larger vendors provide an easy way to self host the storage)