Netflix and Qwikster.

Is this newest announcement subterfuge?  Here's the gist of Netflix' CEO Reed Hastings' blog and email to customers (copy and paste portions of the entire entry -- you can find the original here):

"I messed up. I owe you an explanation. 

It is clear from the feedback over the past two months that many members felt we lacked respect and humility in the way we announced the separation of DVD and streaming and the price changes. That was certainly not our intent, and I offer my sincere apology. Let me explain what we are doing.

We need to focus on rapid improvement as streaming technology and the market evolves, without maintaining compatibility with our DVD by mail service.

So we realized that streaming and DVD by mail are really becoming two different businesses, with very different cost structures, that need to be marketed differently, and we need to let each grow and operate independently.

If you subscribe to both services you will have two entries on your credit card statement, one for Qwikster and one for Netflix. The total will be the same as your current charges. We will let you know in a few weeks when the Qwikster.com website is up and ready."

So the bottom line is: Netflix is going to further inconvenience its customers who saw their prices rise by as much as 60%, by forcing them to split their accounts and now track them separately.  Instead of the convenience of having a single screen to see which movies were available for streaming and which ones were only available on DVD / Blu Ray, now you have to go back and forth between two websites to select the appropriate method you'd like to receiver your movie.

How much you wanna bet Netflix' revenue per customer ends up falling instead of increasing?  Netflix is really pissing customers off.