Reed Hastings, Co-Founder and CEO of Netflix:

>So we realized that streaming and DVD by mail are becoming two quite different businesses, with very different cost structures, different benefits that need to be marketed differently, and we need to let each grow and operate independently. It’s hard for me to write this after over 10 years of mailing DVDs with pride, but we think it is necessary and best: In a few weeks, we will rename our DVD by mail service to “Qwikster”.

A nice post by Hastings to clarify what is going on, but Qwikster is a horrible name. But this cheered me up:

>The additional streaming content we have coming in the next few months is substantial, and we are always working to improve our service further.

With Starz leaving Netflix in 2012 it looked as though the streaming catalog is set to dwindle. Perhaps given this statement Netflix has found another (more direct?) way of obtaining content — let’s hope so.