Are We Surprised People Are Pissed at Netflix?

via AllThingsD

Turns out Netflix customers took the service's recent price hike harder than expected. As a result, the multiplatform video rental company has had to cut third -quarter U.S. subscriber projections by 4% from 25 million to 24 million. "The majority of the shrinkage, Netflix says, will come from its DVD-only customers," reports All Things D.

Still, "Netflix now sees 9.8 million streaming-only customers, down from 10 million previously, and 2.2 million DVD-only customers, down from 3 million expected previously," Barron's Tech Trader Daily reports. "Total streaming  said it expected a bump in third-quarter revenues as a result of the price hike (for DVD and streaming video joint subscribers).

Despite the new subscriber growth projections, "Netflix said that its financial outlook hasn't changed," ZDNet writes. "In other words, the financials add up for Netflix."

Netflix also originally said it expected its growth trajectory to resume by the end of the year, but the chances of that are now looking less likely. Regarding to change, GigaOm writes: "That appears to have had an effect on the number of people subscribing to the service."

Netflix CEO Reed Hastings said he saw all this coming. "We knew what we were getting into," he said, according to All Things D. "We tried to be as straightforward as we could, and that has worked out very well for us."

Said Netflix in a statement: "We know our decision to split our services has upset many of our subscribers, which we don't take lightly, but we believe this split will help us make our services better for subscribers and shareholders for years to come."

Twitter Unveiling New Look Next Week

As reported by Kara Swisher at AllThingsD, the new site will feature a search box, information on Twitter trends and, in the vein of Twitter 101, a variety of information about effective uses for the San Francisco-based service. It's a shift from the current page, with which users interact in their own spheres as opposed to a centralized location.

"You can try it out without having to sign up, so you can get an idea of what Twitter is before you use it," co-founder Biz Stone said in the AllThingsD report. "We need to do a better job of explaining ourselves to people who hear about us and then have no idea what do to . . . We want it to show us as a place where people can discover what is going on in real-time and much more."

This, says Internet News, "seems to represent the company's efforts to bridge the gap between Twitter as a curiosity and Twitter as a mainstream communications channel."