Why the internet ruins everything

Hulu, the online tv show provider, is creating a subscription model: ten bucks a month for access to more shows than just the five most recent episodes of a series. This is part of a plan to try and teach us to pay for premium and professional content.

But that's not how the internet works. I can choose to pay for shows, or I can search around and find them for free. And it's not too hard to find many shows for free.

The rules of professional content on the internet:
1. People are going to pirate your stuff.
This is what happens on the internet. It's a feeding ground for people to take other people's content. I do it all the time, because the technology makes it simple. I can download images from websites, and if the site won't let me download, I can take a screenshot of what I need.
This leads me to:
2. There is no way to stop people from pirating your stuff
Technology is a poor substitute for security. Think that you can shut people out of free content? Think again. Create a secure system, and hundreds of thousands of hackers will attempt to systematically disassemble it (if they can be bothered to). Internet security always has a weakness, a backdoor. And it will be found.
3. If you're not putting it online for free, odds are someone else is.
Thanks to P2P software and video hosting sites, it really doesn't cost a person anything to offer someone else's content for free. Sometimes, these sites can even make money off their own advertising. That's right major networks: other people are making money off your hard-earned work.

So what's a major network to do? Internet pirates may be able to take your content, but they can't take your stars. Things can be copied, but experiences can't. Bootleg video of a concert is not the same as actually being at the concert, and bootleg movies aren't the same as being there in the theatre.
This is the final rule:
4. People will pay for things they can't get for free, and you're in a prime position to offer those things.
Want to draw a crowd to your site? have the actors chat with fans online about the show. Make it participatory. Make it special.

Also, don't think that just because it's 'premium content' that people are gonna pay for it. There is a lot of professionally-produced content that is absolute garbage. There's also some (but not a lot) of non-professionally produced content that is darn good. Bo Burnham, Tremendosaur icanhascheezburger, etc. That annoying fred kid is getting a movie deal, and he started with nothing. The tools needed to produce and distribute content are cheap, and we don't have the same constraints that the networks do.

The internet ruined the model that the networks and music labels came to love. And they're now going to have to play by a different set of rules. Our rules. I can hardly wait.