If you want to catch up on the big change, and big apology, that Netflix offered its subscribers via e-mail this morning, read Kelly's excellent writeup in the TV section. Essentially Netflix has now become two companies, one of them an online-only streaming service called Netflix, and one of them a DVD-by-mail service-- which is all that Netflix used to be, back in the beginning-- saddled with the unfortunate name Qwikster.
The service doesn't even exist yet and already Qwikster seems like the forgotten stepchild of the company, from the hip-in-2003 name to the fact that the website isn't even running yet. Oh, and if you want to find the company on twitter to ask it some questions, you might want to wait for that too. No one at Netflix bothered to secure the @Qwikster Twitter account before making this big announcement. Here's a sample of the last few tweets from that account:
Presumably Jason Castillo is about to make a ton of money selling that name to Netflix, but in the meantime, this seems like a prime example of the sloppy way Netlix is changing all of this. No matter how apologetic the tone of Hastings's e-mail today, it still seems like Netflix is trying to double their profits by cutting the baby in half. They've completely owned DVD rental AND streaming in recent years, but the messy split into two companies seems like an easy opportunity for another, better organized company to swoop in and take over both.
