At a J.P. Morgan conference held in Boston on Wednesday, Netflix CFO David Wells said that the company was looking up and, more importantly, customers who cancelled the service because of the Qwikster rebranding, plan repricing, and subsequent poor PR are now returning.

The company drove users away due to a considerable price hike on its cheapest disk plan – from $9.99 to $15.98 – as well as its ham-handed decision to split the company into a streaming arm – Netflix – and a disc-in-the-mail arm – Qwikster. Wells said:

Netflix pricing is currently set at $7.99 a month for one DVD (not Blu-Ray) disc out at a time or unlimited streaming, and $16 for unlimited streaming and one disc. The steady return of disgruntled customers is a testament to the breadth of Netflix’s streaming selection and general economic improvements.

Netflix just released their Q1 2012 earnings report [PDF], and managed to beat analyst estimates by reporting losses of $0.08 per share on $870 million in revenue.

In the weeks leading up to the release, analysts projected a net loss of $0.27 per share on $866 million in revenue thanks to the company’s pronounced push for international growth.

That works out to a $5 million net loss for the quarter, though the brass are preparing themselves for better days to come. According to their release, CEO Reed Hastings and CFO David Wells expect to return to global profitability next quarter, and are gearing up for their launch in a still-unknown new European market in Q4.

Perhaps more importantly, the company also reported that they picked up “nearly 3 million” new subscribers for their streaming business, a full 1.21 million of whom are international customers. This quarter’s bump also puts Netflix’s domestic streaming numbers at 23.41 million customers, falling right in line with the company’s expectations.

Netflix’s streaming selection took a substantial hit earlier this year when their four-year licensing deal with Starz finally expired, and it was feared that they loss of content could affect the growth of their streaming subscriber base but that doesn’t seem to have been the case — there has been “no discernible change in churn or viewing levels” since the deal expired.

That frankly comes as a bit of a surprise considering the strength of the Starz media portfolio, but apparently users ended up migrating toward Netflix’s remaining catalog of episodic TV. To that end, Netflix’s focus on original programming is becoming more an area for expansion rather than an experiment, though they’re still unsure whether or not they’ll ever spend more than the previously stated 5% of their content buy on the endeavor.

Considering Netflix’s focus on the streaming end, the company’s physical disc business (as you may imagine) hasn’t fared as well — the company posted a loss of 1.08 million domestic DVD customers in Q1, after having lost 2.76 million of them last quarter. If you’ve yet to sate yourself with Netflix’s financials, stay tuned — the company will be hosting an earnings call at 3PM Pacific/6PM Eastern, and we’ll keep you abreast of any juicy developments.

Spain is getting its own version of Netflix, thanks to a company called Youzee, which exits its private beta period today. Like Netflix, Youzee offers streaming movies and TV on-demand, but it also features titles for rent, too. The company has agreements with a number of distributors, including BBC, Sony, Disney, Fox International Channels, TVE, Telemundo and more.

To kick off its launch, Youzee is offering new users to try out the service for free.

New users can watch up to 10 hours from Youzee’s catalog for free, without entering in their credit card information. Another option invites users to try out Youzee for 30 days for free, if they’re willing to hand over their payment data in advance. Both offers provide access to the entire catalog, and will include the ability to stream from desktop, tablet or mobile.

After the free trial ends, Youzee’s subscription service is 6.99 euros monthly to continue watching, plus the option to rent out of catalog content for 2.99 or 4.99 (HD). In terms of content, while the company may have deals in place with several distributors, clicking on them from the drop-down box provided sometimes leads you to an empty section – so, clearly access to content is not on par with U.S.-based Netflix, for example.

The service also includes social sharing options built-in, which let its users post to Facebook and Twitter. Also revealed today is the Youzee iPhone application, which will become available in the App Store in a couple of weeks and will feature a remote control. Youzee’s Paula Pérez-Gándaras also tells us that an app for Samsung’s Smart TV’s has also been developed has launched.

Youzee was founded by Carlos Cruz and Fernando Évole. It’s backed by Spanish venture capital and employs a team of 54. Based in Madrid, Youzee describes itself as a startup with “an international outlook,” and the company previously told us that it plans to develop the model in other European countries in the future. The service launched into private beta in December 2011, and now counts nearly 50,000 users, according to the ticker on its website.

Update: The Samsung TV app has actually gone live – Paula originally gave us different info.

Subscription flower delivery Service H.Bloom, which once described itself as the ‘Netflix of Flowers,’ raised a $10 million Series B funding round today. The investment was lead by Shasta Ventures with the participation of a number of existing VC funds and angel investors, including Battery Ventures, Thomas Lehrman of Gerson Lerhman Group, and ShoeDazzle’s Brian Lee. Shasta’s Sean Flynn is also joining the H.Bloom board. In total, including this round, H.Bloom has now raised $18 million.

H.Bloom was founded almost exactly two years ago. The New York-based service currently operates in four metropolitan areas (New York City, Chicago, San Francisco and Washington, D.C.) and has 53 employees.

As H.Bloom CEO Bryan Burkhart told me earlier today, the floral business is a “sleepy but $35 billion industry” that’s ripe for disruption. The company plans to use this funding round to build out its marketing and sales operations, as well as to make its delivery infrastructure more efficient. Most importantly, though, Burkhart said, H.Bloom will use this money to expand into new cities, but he wouldn’t say which specific metropolitan areas the company is targeting for this expansion.

The concept behind the service is pretty straightforward and indeed very Netflix-like. After you sign up, H.Bloom will regularly deliver a fresh bouquet of your choice to your door. You can choose how often per month you would like these fresh flowers to arrive (weekly, bi-weekly and monthly). The price for this service starts at $29.99 and goes up from there (orchids are $85 per bouquet).

Netflix is rolling out a major update to its Xbox 360 application today, which is the biggest update to arrive since the integration of Kinect gestures and voice control back in December of last year. The updated app brings a number of new features and enhancements, but the most notable changes involve improvements to Facebook sharing in select markets and single sign-on support using your Xbox LIVE credentials. Single sign-on means you can now sign using your own Xbox LIVE account in order to watch Netflix movies on consoles other than your own.

Also included in the app’s refresh are improvements to the Skip Forward and Skip back buttons, a zoom function that lets you enlarge letterboxed video to full screen mode, and better contrast, which Netflix says will make colors more vivid and blacks more pure.

For international users, Netflix has improved Facebook integration for members in Canada, Latin America, the U.K or Ireland. This allows Netflix users to see what shows their friends have watched and rated on Netflix. Users also have more control over what shows and movies they’ve viewed when sharing to Facebook. Unfortunately, these social features are not available in the U.S. at this time due to legal issues surrounding the 1988 Video Privacy Protection Act, which prevents users’ movie rental activity from being shared.

Changes to that act have been making their way through Congress, however, which could allow Netflix to include the social sharing options within its Xbox 360 app in the U.S., as well as offer an Open Graph-enabled application on Facebook itself.

As for now, current Netflix users will automatically receive the updated the next time they go to launch the app on their gaming console. New users can download the app from the Xbox LIVE Apps Marketplace instead.

Update: We’ve reached out to Netflix for more details on how the Facebook sharing options have been improved.

Update #2: A Netflix spokesperson has clarified the social sharing changes for us, stating:

“Indeed, we have had Facebook integration in these markets, but we have now expanded that on Xbox. Specifically, members who use Xbox 360 with Netflix will see additional rows in their Xbox experience that show what their friends watched and rated so they can discover new things to watch. We have also added more granular sharing controls so members can decide not to share on a title by title basis.”

Netflix has been making a few moves to separate its DVD business more from its streaming operation, and today brings news of the latest move in that direction: the company has bought the domain name DVD.com, the company has confirmed to us.

The news raises questions of Netflix possibly getting ready to pull a Qwikster on us after all and separate its streaming and DVD businesses — something others have suggested it might do — but TechCrunch understands that there are no plans to spin off its DVD business into a separate company, à la the Qwikster strategy of last year that so qwikly spiraled into a PR disaster for the company, and was then abandoned.

News of the DVD.com domain purchase was first reported by Domain Name Wire earlier today. We reached out to Netflix, which told us that this was part of its bigger strategy to improve user experience around its DVD rentals business, a service it offers only in the U.S.

“In the U.S. we look to provide a great experience for our members, those who have DVD only, streaming only and those who have both,” a spokesperson told us. Indeed, on Netflix some reviewers pinpoint specific features in DVDs that do not appear on the streamed editions of certain pieces of content — for example extra features, commentary, and so on. Similarly, the streaming comments often related to the actual quality of the streams — again, not so relevant for DVD users.

Ratings, we understand, will continue to remain centralized and go across both streaming and DVD versions of the same piece of content.

Last time around, Netflix qwikly saw the err of its ways in trying to separate those two parts of its business, so this time around it’s very unlikely to try to repeat the same thing again.

At this point the DVD business is actually proving more lucrative in terms of revenues for Netflix than the streaming business. In Q4, Netflix had 11.1 million DVD subscribers, which represented revenues of $370 million. U.S. streaming subscribers for that quarter were nearly double, at 21.6 million, but only had revenues of $476 million.

Of course, there is likely to be significantly more overhead in running that DVD business longer term. But for now it seems that streaming isn’t big enough to really stand on its own for the company. Also, there are very likely more promotional costs in building out that streaming business — that includes the increasing costs associated with getting exclusive rights to content in the face of a number of competing services from Amazon, Google and others also going for same users, and the same catalog of films and TV shows.

What this will mean, effectively, is that DVD users will eventually have their own web site to visit to order their DVDs and otherwise manage their subscriptions, rather than have to navigate through a Netflix site that will most likely be more completely given over to streaming promotions.

By separating DVD and streaming customers more, there seems to be a bit of a question mark over how successful Netflix has been in upselling those DVD customers to streaming. Perhaps that was the original idea, but by separating them even more, it seems to imply that those customers are being found elsewhere more readily. So why not make the experience for the DVD users a little nicer in the process?

Pop the champagne and up the bandwidth, because 2012 is the year we finally do away with discs. According to a Bloomberg report on IHS Screen Digest, more viewers will stream movies than watch them on disc, an inflection point that can only mean the relatively quick demise of high-density optical media. Streaming will increase to 3.4 billion titles this year, up from 1.4 billion. Blu-ray and DVD consumption will top out at 2.4 billion.

The study also found that Amazon on Netflix accounted for 94% of all paid movie consumption online.

In a hilarious aside, the author of the IHS report, Dan Cryan, noted: “But the transition is likely to take time: almost nine years after the launch of the iTunes Store, CDs are still a vital part of the music business.” He clearly meant to write “of the music business in 2001.”

Arguably there are still plenty of people around the world buying DVDs and CDs but Blu-Ray is ready to hit a brick wall. Why invest in HD movies in optical form when you can get the same quality in a download on your newish smart TV or with a lower-end set-top box. The developing world is definitely still mostly optical, but as broadband speeds increase that could quickly change. Considering most big movies appear in digital form – legally or illegally – shortly after release, it definitely takes the bloom off the release window rose to pick up a DVD months after the movie closed.

[Image: Dedyukhin Dmitry /Shutterstock]

Following last month’s news of Netflix’s second original scripted series, “Orange Is the New Black,” Netflix has confirmed that yet another original show, a horror series called “Hemlock Grove,” will begin airing on its streaming service in early 2013.

Netflix has exclusive rights to the 13-episode series, which tells the tale of a young girl’s murder set in a ravaged Pennsylvania steel town, and whose killer could be any one of several odd and frightening people…or creatures.

The show’s possible bad guys include a Gypsy kid who may be a werewolf, an escapee from a nearby biotech facility, and, perhaps the most frightening of all, the arrogant son whose family ran the steel mill business and now controls the town. Sounds like good stuff, if you’re into that gothic mystery genre, I suppose.

“Hemlock Grove,” which is based on a novel by Brian McGreevy, stars Famke Janssen and Bill Skarsgard and is being produced by Gaumont International Television. Eli Roth, who performed in “Inglourious Basterds” and created the “Hostel” franchise (yeah…thanks for that), is credited as both the director and exec producer on the new series.

Also exec producing the series are the book’s author McGreevy, Lee Shipman, Eric Newman (“The last Exorcism,” “Dawn of the Dead,” “Children of Men”) and Michael Connolly (“How to Train Your Dragon,” “Battlestar Gallatica”).

It’s notable that in terms of the executive producers at least, if not the actors, Netflix’s shows are not coming from newcomers and unknowns, but rather those who have previous experience in the industry. These are not “wannabes,” so to speak, they’re just among the first to bet big on this disruptive, over-the-top, streaming format for delivering a new way to watch television.

Netflix has been moving rapidly to expand into content creation, making deals which have also included the above-mentioned “Orange is the New Black,” the Steven Van Zandt vehicle “Lilyhammer,” as well as new episodes of “Arrested Development,” and an adaptation of the British miniseries “House of Cards,” which is set to arrive in the U.S. and Canada by late 2012. Rumors have been circling, too, that Netflix may pick up the recently cancelled sci-fi show from Fox “Terra Nova,” and today word comes that it’s also eying ABC’s “The River,” also facing cancellation.

By the middle of 2013, the company confirms it will have at least five original shows available for streaming.

Network TV is safe despite Netflix’s moves (at least for now), since it reaches a broad audience, including those who don’t pay for cable, but who rely on over-the-air transmission. However, Netflix has the potential to shake up the cable industry, especially premium cable TV, if the company decides to take it head on…and doesn’t end up getting into bed with them instead. While today, potential premium cable customers are frustrated with their inability to subscribe to the quality programs on pay cable channels via a la carte options (see, for example, MG’s ongoing complaints regarding HBO’s lockdown on “Game of Thrones”), it’s possible that in the not-so-distant future we’ll have a wide variety of quality TV found outside of premium cable to choose from.

And by quality, of course, I mean critically acclaimed, adult-targeted programming – the shows that couldn’t make it on ABC, NBC or CBS where the entire American TV-viewing audience is the demographic they hope to attract. There’s a reason why harmless, but brain-rotting reality competitions and laugh-tracked filled sitcoms starring attractive 20-year olds are among the country’s top shows in Nielsen ratings – they don’t offend anyone.

Except those viewers who expect more from the TV format, of course.

To compete with what will hopefully be a growing audience who ditches HBO (or Showtime, Cinemax, etc.) for Netflix’s streaming service in the coming months, real battles will begin: for actors, for scripts, for directors and producers, and of course, for viewers. Netflix may even be able to force the pay channels’ hand in the matter, if enough of the audience resorts to pirating their content, while paying for Netflix. It may be too late for today’s “Game of Thrones,” but by the time another show of that caliber rolls around, it might not be on cable.

Over the past few weeks, you may have noticed that Netflix wants you to “Agree” to something. The company has updated its terms of service, and within the new version, there lies an interesting little tidbit that you may want to review.

From the “Arbitration Agreement”:

These Terms of Use provide that all disputes between you and Netflix will be resolved by BINDING ARBITRATION. YOU AGREE TO GIVE UP YOUR RIGHT TO GO TO COURT to assert or defend your rights under this contract (except for matters that may be taken to small claims court). Your rights will be determined by a NEUTRAL ARBITRATOR and NOT a judge or jury and your claims cannot be brought as a class action.

Awesome.

Generally speaking, this means that you have absolutely no right to take Netflix to court over anything, including getting some buddies together and filing a class-action lawsuit. Of course, you’ll still have the option of lodging a complaint, going to small claims court, and/or entering into binding arbitration with the company, but no gavels will be involved. (At least, I don’t think any arbitrators have gavels?)

Netflix got in some hot water last year, shelling out $9 million after the loss of a class-action suit. Virginia residents had filed a suit claiming that Netflix was holding on to their DVD and instant records two years after they had cancelled the service — a violation of a 24-year old law.

Perhaps Netflix is reacting to this huge loss, but the timing seems way late. Come to think of it, it’s a little curious why Netflix would change its terms of service now… randomly. Why not include this provision right from the start?

Last month, we covered the relaunch of Prescreen, a curated, on-demand video platform. The company, which was founded by ex-Groupon and Zoosk execs, launched last November with the goal of giving movie lovers an easy way to discover independent films, and, in turn, offering filmmakers and producers an alternative, online channel for marketing and distribution.

Earlier this year, Prescreen added former Paramount Pictures and Sony Pictures Entertainment and current Blockbuster exec Tim Wesley along with film financing, sales and distribution company IM Global Founder Stuart Ford. Today, Prescreen is announcing the addition of another industry exec to its advisory board: Founding Netflix exec and former RedBox President, Mitch Lowe.

Prescreen Co-founder and early Groupon executive Shawn Bercuson said that Lowe has always been “a data guy” and has already asked the team for all available data so that he can get to work finding ways to optimize customer and filmmaker experience. Lowe himself said his goal has always been to find ways to increase and expand consumer film exploration, and he saw his role at Prescreen as another great opportunity to do that.

The startup raised an early $1 million round of seed financing from former Facebook VP Chamath Palihapitiya and others, and has since been focused not only on finding premium content, but building out an advisory board of industry veterans to help guide the startup through the process of building an on-demand video business.

As to Prescreen’s model, Bercuson said that the recent poor press and disappointing early domestic performance of blockbuster John Carter is further evidence that Hollywood hasn’t quite gotten it figured out yet. John Carter was one of Disney’s largest movies to date, costing $250 million to produce. These big budget movies just aren’t making what they used to, and studios are struggling to find the target audience for their movies in spite of colossal marketing spend.

The major studios are beginning to produce fewer and fewer movies per year to be safe, and as a result, theaters are starved for content. So, it could get interesting if these theater chains started to approach Prescreen, as they look for a better way to find out what’s working — and what people are watching. Margin Call was a good example, which had a limited theatrical release, and had early digital distribution with Amazon and others. Because the movie was well received, it then went from four theaters to 400.

Increasingly, theaters are looking to replicate this model, because they don’t want to give tons of screen space to certain films — even if they’re blockbusters — only to find out that fans weren’t that excited about it in the first place. This is where Prescreen could become a valuable tool for theaters, as the startup is planning to do more “exclusive releases” — or day-and-date and pre-theatrical releases. If Prescreen is showing early buzz and engagement with a certain film, and theaters get access to that data via the startup, they can start to make better choices about what films they’re showing and where.

Because of Prescreen’s Facebook integration (more here), there’s more of an opportunity for filmmakers and distributors to discover, say, that there’s a conversation happening online around a particular film in Seattle. Theaters could then react quickly and release the film in theaters in the Seattle area. As with so many other industries, data — really social data — has the potential to disrupt the old model of content distribution and marketing. And advisors like Lowe are keen to help Prescreen lead the way.

Netflix now provides content with captions or subtitles for more than 80 percent of the hours streamed in the U.S. To be clear, this doesn’t mean that 80+ percent of Netflix’s streaming content has captions, but that of all the hours of streaming content watched in the U.S., over 80 percent of it was captioned in some way.

This is a significant improvement, considering that captions were only present on 40 percent of hours streamed in June, and 60 percent in November. Netflix is also pushing content providers to offer up already-captioned content, while authoring subtitles for content that doesn’t already have them, according to this blog post.

But the company warns, that final 20 percent won’t be completed as quickly as the rest. This is because it’s mostly content that is rarely watched, so even if Netflix adds captions at a crazy rate, the metric itself will take some time to catch up.

Back in June, Netflix was sued by the National Association of the Deaf for not providing captions for most of its streaming content. If you’ll notice, that’s around the same time that Netflix picked up the pace to now double the number of hours streamed with captions.

If you’re like me and watch almost all of your Netflix streaming TV/movies on a laptop, captioning isn’t just helpful, it’s necessary. Those little speakers don’t help much at all when I need to pick up every little detail in Battlestar Galactica and Lost, so we’re glad to see Netflix keep up the pace.

It seems as though nobody’s a fan of RIM’s BlackBerry PlayBook. Last year, I would’ve agreed wholeheartedly. What’s a tablet good for — ahem, an enterprise-style tablet no less — if you can’t natively check email, store contacts, or access a calendar.

But even though much of that’s going to change with the release of PlayBook 2.0 OS, some peeps still can’t get on board. In this instance, it would be Netflix. According to Reuters, Netflix has stated that it has no plans to support the BlackBerry PlayBook or any other BlackBerry device for that matter.

Even with the issues Netflix has had in the past year — including awful streaming margins and a price hike backlash — the fact that consumers are putting even more screens in front of their faces should bode well. Still, Netflix doesn’t seem to be too enthused with RIM or their offerings.

Netflix is already available on the iPad, iPhone, and various Android devices. Since the PlayBook 2.0 OS comes with an Android emulator (which lets people play with Android apps on the PlayBook), we had thought that it would be relatively easy for the Android app to be ported over to the PlayBook. Unfortunately, no such luck.

When I first saw the pitch for Splitflix over the weekend I guffawed a little into my bourbon. The site purports to allow you to “share” your Netflix or Hulu account with a random stranger using a P2P matching system. You and the other person pay half of the cost of the subscription and then enjoy your cheaper streaming accounts.

However, after a bit of digging, as a product it seems solid and as an act of protest, however misguided, it’s sure to get at least a little bit of attention. It’s even technically OK – or at least not prohibited – in the Netflix terms of service:

And Hulu didn’t mention password sharing.

To be clear, I don’t think this is a good idea. I think Hulu and Netflix will find some way to stop it and the possibility that two strangers would share an account without driving each other crazy with movie choices is slim to none. Even if we don’t have to watch the same thing, I’d still go nuts if all I saw were Van Damme flicks in my shared Recently Watched list. I could also foresee a situation where one member of team Splitfix stops paying, but the damage would be limited in that case. You’re also going to be limited in what you do with the site later as I suspect a sale is out of the question.

As a money saving opportunity I applaud Splitflix for giving this a shot. The site is in beta now so there’s no way to “test” it at the moment. There was some talk this summer about cracking down on shared Netflix streams but our anecdotal tests of Netflix and Hulu allowed at least two devices to stream at the same time. It doesn’t seem totally legit, like that picture of the dark overpass with the phrase “Free Hugs” spray-painted on the concrete. But maybe – just maybe – those hugs will be real.

Following this month’s debut of Lilyhammer, Netflix’s first scripted series, word is that the company is now preparing to launch a second original show. The company has ordered 13 episodes of Orange is the New Black, a comedy from Jenji Kohan, the creator of Showtimes’s Weeds. The show is based on the memoir of a communications exec who served time for drug charges in a women’s prison.

The deal is being confirmed by Bloomberg (via SFGate, AdAge), who spoke to someone “with knowledge of the situation,” but rumors surrounding the negotiations for this show have reached as far back as November. According to an earlier report from Deadline, Netflix was finalizing a deal for Kohan’s series through Lionsgate TV, where Kohan has a development deal. Netflix is already partnered with Lionsgate, as it had agreed in April 2011 to stream up to seven seasons of the studio’s popular AMC show Mad Men.

Bloomberg’s report states that Netflix will have first rights to the new show from Weeds‘ creator HBO, but Weeds is actually a Showtime series. That’s the only aspect to the report that raises a red flag. Everything else seems to be confirmation of the previous rumors.

The new series may be exec produced by Liz Friedman, the co-exec producer of House, according to Deadline’s previous report. As for the show itself, it tells the tale of Piper Kerman, a communications executive at a nonprofit, who spent a year in the minimum security correctional facility in Danbury, Conn. after being convicted for her part in a drug smuggling and money laundering scheme she was involved in back in college.

Orange is the New Black is the second show whose production will be financed by Netflix. The company also has the exclusive distribution rights to Lilyhammer as well as new episodes of Arrested Development (planned for 2013), but is producing the Kevin Spacey vehicle House of Cards, announced back in March. That show, an adaptation of a popular British miniseries (which Netflix outbid HBO and AMC for), is expected to debut later this year.

According to Bloomberg’s report, announcements related to Orange is the New Black as well as another deal with Gaumont International Television for a 13-episode horror series Hemlock Grove may arrive as soon as next week. No word yet on when those programs will be available for viewing, but Netflix’s Chief Content Officer Ted Sarandos told the outlet there would be five original shows available for streaming by mid-2013.

As everyone and their dog moves to online production, podcasters have long hunted for a way to monetize their goods. Apps are available that let you sell podcasts for a set price, but what about aggregation over multiple platforms and using varying monetization models? More important, podcasters don’t want to do all the computerin’ to make these things work. That’s why Libsyn created MyLibsyn, a cross-platform (web, iOS, and Android) system for disseminating free and paid content from a central app.

Libsyn has just created something akin to the Netflix of content syndication. Podcasters who join must offer one piece of premium content per month as well as make their back catalog subscriber-only. Although they already offer standalone Android and iOS apps for certain podcasts, MyLibsyn assists in podcast discovery by putting all the popular podcasts in one place and, by ensuring only quality product appears in the app, it reduces the chance that podcast listeners will be disappointed and move on.

Full disclosure: I recently moved my podcast to Libsyn after Mevio pulled the plug on their general production system, so I’ve been able to see how the products work firsthand. Fellow Mevio sufferers: Libsyn is offering free import from Mevio. I put the instructions here.

That said, the model is fairly interesting, especially considering how hard it is to bring good content to the fore in the crowded podcast marketplace. They’ve started the program with a few popular podcasts including the WTF Podcast with Marc Maron.

“It is a easy way for producers to make premium content available to their audience – and it does not require any special RSS feeds or other tech knowledge by the end users to subscribe and consume content,” said Rob Walch, Libsyn, VP of Podcaster Relations. “You sign up for a subscription to get premium content. And it really helps to support the producers directly.”

“We have a lot of producers with great evergreen content (all the big comedy podcasts) and many were looking for a way to better monetize their content,” he said. “This solution was really driven very strongly by the requirements of Marc Maron for his show and content. He was having an issue with others posting old content – and we needed a way to make sure premium content would be very secure.”

The company is also looking into making the service available for premium users including training customers who need to make video content available to a secure group of subscribers.

Podcasters can sign up here but you have to be a Libsyn customer and meet certain requirements to participate.

Personal recommendations have always been a part of ecommerce, but there has been little innovation since Amazon introduced retail and product personalization 10 years ago. But with the increasing mountains of data at digital retailers’ fingertips, ecommerce is about to get even more personal.

The fact is that right now there is little iteration from personalized ecommerce beyond what is taking place on Amazon. So you’ll see suggestions of what other shoppers who bought a certain item also purchased, or recommendations to similar items to what you have purchased, but there is a whole world of social data, and even more-in-depth purchase data that can be mined by retailers to help increase sales.

Kleiner Perkins partner Aileen Lee agrees with me, “In the future, the best  retail sites will know you much better and show you things that are much more relevant.” Lee has helped lead investments in a number of e-commerce companies including Offermatic, One Kings Lane, Plum District, Rent the Runway, and Trendyol and held operating roles at The Gap and North Face.

“We are just at the beginning of a revolution of e-commerce, and existing retailers are going to have to get better at personalizing the experience for consumers,” Lee says.

“Personalization was really important in enabling Amazon to differentiate itself and grow in past ten years,” David Selinger, CEO and co-founder of RichRelevance. Selinger also was Amazon’s Manager, Consumer Behavior Research and helped build some of the site’s personalization features a number of years ago. “Personalization will be the differentiating factor in e-commerce and digital commerce going forward, especially for multichannel retailers and new entrants online.”

Amazon and Netflix represent the first wave of personalization. I believe that we are going to enter into the next wave of a more personalized e-commerce experience as retailers and e-commerce sites move towards mining data to improve sales and conversions.

It’s highly likely that you have helped boost Amazon and Netflix’s conversion rates on movies, books, or other products thanks to personalized suggestions of items that you may like based on your previous purchase data, other consumers’ purchase history and more. In fact, it’s so seamlessly baked into the user experience for both companies, that I tend to not even notice how impactful personalization is on what I purchase.

That’s not to say that Amazon is the only retailer experimenting with personalization. eBay has also been personalizing the marketplace experience with recommendations of similarly viewed or bought items for some time, and is looking to expand personalization efforts with PayPal. And with the recent acquisition of Hunch, we know eBay is going to ramp up data mining.

Recently, I started to receive emails from Gilt Groupe that suggested similar earring to like those those I had added to my wait-list on the e-commerce site. The company also sends personalized email notifications on sales that are tailored to each customer. Gilt, who declined to comment for this piece, seems to realize that personalization is going to be a key product driver for the site in the future. And brick and mortar retailers like Saks Fifth Avenue, and many others are also starting to jump on the personalized email bandwagon.

The Challenges

The best way begin understanding the opportunity of personalization in the future is to realize the immense challenge that retailers face when approaching personalization. As DJ Patil, Data Scientist in Residence at Greylock Partners, explains, “When you go to Nordstrom you have a shopping assistant helps direct you, basically says ‘I’m here to help, what do you need and here’s where to find this.’ No online retailer has quite nailed that,” he explains.

For most retailers, the toughest hurdle is to have enough data on an individual to actually help personalize the experience. For the majority of buyers who purchase from a specific site once every few months, or even less frequently, a retailer may have no real sense of direction on how to present similar products.

Getting these data points is the biggest challenge that retailers face. But retailers do have significant data for the small amount of regular, routine customers for an e-commerce site, including clicks, purchase history, shopping cart information, shares and Likes, and more. Retailers face challenges on how to store and organize this data, and then turn this into personal recommendations

And data comes in various forms. There’s implicit data (which is gained from your everyday actions on a retailer’s site) and explicit data (which you offer to sites via surveys or quizzes). While retailers are doing more with the implicit data (i.e. reminding you when you left items in your shopping cart); no one has yet mastered the art of capturing that precious explicit data.

Google’s Boutiques.com tried its hand at this, as a search engine and fashion site which allowed users to receive personalized clothes and accessory recommendations based on preferences and actions. But Google subsequently shut the portal down last September.

Asking for users to fill out surveys of what they love or like perhaps isn’t the ticket to drawing explicit data, such as brands you love, colors, styles and more. As Patil explains, retailers who ask for this information need to present this as more of a conversation as opposed to replicating the feel of a doctor’s appointment where you are filling out your life history via forms.

Getting these signals from consumers is very difficult from a UI and user experience stand point, he says. His advice to retailers is to find a way to replicate how a store owner or shop keeper would engage you in a conversation when walking into a store and looking for something open-ended, such as a birthday gift. One way to do this is to present a personalized item suggestion but ask the consumer (in a Pandora-like fashion) if the recommendation sucks and how they can make the shopper’s life better “People want to help the system and love to correct things,” Patil says.

And similar to Pandora, people become more invested in a platform that knows their preferences and will be more likely to return.

There’s also the issue of finding the balance between providing serendipity in terms of discovery and personalization. Retailers still want their sites to be this Pandora’s box of discovering items, literally, but personalization can cut down on this discovery process. So retailers need to both anticipate what consumers may want to purchase on the site but also provide items that consumers will be able to feel like they ‘discovered’ on the site.

Patil draws an interesting comparison with how grocery stores have been able to structure their layouts to provide serendipity and useful discovery. “When you go to the supermarket, the stores know you are definitely going to milk aisle, so they often put it in the back of the store, so you can find serendipitous stuff on the way. Online retailers need to replicate that on e-commerce sites.” In the end, the goal is to be able to deliver personalization without being predictable.

At a macro level, retailers also face challenges in finding talent to sort this big data. The difference between doing data personalization well are radical shifts financially for retailers, Selinger explains. The engineers who are able to parse these massive amounts of data are hard to come by, and expensive.

Social

Social data (i.e. the Facebook Likes of products, what products people are recommending on Facebook or Twitter) is going to be a big part of personalization for retailers in the future. Already plenty of retailers are using Facebook social plugins and Connect integrations to leverage Facebook data to show visitors what friends bought or shared, what products relate to their Likes, and which friends they might want to invite.

The problem with this data is that much of it is unstructured, and there is really no one who has effectively nailed social personalization in the commerce arena the way Amazon was able to do with data from purchase behavior. Blippy attempted to socialize purchases, but it failed. Amazon also allows you to connect to Facebook to access your friends’ Likes and recommendations but I find this UI to be clunky, and not very useful.

Selinger thinks that mining social data for ecommerce may lose steam before it takes off, drawing the comparison to email. “In 2007, if you were to walk into VC’s office with an idea about ecommerce and email, you would have been sent out the door,” Selinger says. But he explains that while there is an inherent enterprise value in this social data, it will take a long time to take off, similar to the way it took awhile for personalized email and commerce models to enter the market. “When someone figures out how to do it and do it well, it will grow really quickly,” he maintains.

The challenge for retailers is making sense of the Facebook news feed — i.e. streamlining recommendations, attaching brands and tags to this data and then serving this to shoppers in a useful, personalized format. Basically, your social network can become your Consumer Reports.

The challenge for the data mining community, explains Patil, is actually figuring out the intent in much of the unstructured data that is posted about retail products and brands on Facebook. And it’s important to keep in mind that some of this data from Facebook users is private.

This past week, Facebook partnered up with sixty different startups to add their “stories” to Facebook Timeline, through apps that span different verticals from Food, Fashion to Travel. Part of this involved adding new actions (in addition to ‘like’) to Timeline story options. That includes the verbs ‘bought’ and ‘want.’

There is tremendous potential in developers and retailers being able to mine this data from ‘boughts’ and wants’ as opposed to the open-ended ‘like.’ You can see details on what social shopping mall Payvment is doing with the new protocols here, but basically, the ability to add these targeted buttons could be game-changing for social discovery in e-commerce.

Privacy

Echoing Lee’s thoughts, Patil is confident that there will be a new wave of personalization and e-commerce. But without data, there is no personalization. So consumers both on Facebook as well as on retail sites will have to be more willing to give up key data like purchase history, Likes and other social actions, and even location in order to get a more personalized shopping experience on retail sites.

The key will be getting consumers to understand that more data will improve their shopping experience, and making the choice of opting-in a no brainer.

Selinger agrees that privacy is going to be an important issue in the next tranche of personalization innovation. “Now more than ever, consumers are more cognizant of what’s happening with their data,” he says. But what retailers have in the favor is a strong foundation of privacy practices, because these companies have had to protect consumer financial and credit card data for time. Selinger believes that retailers will be very thoughtful about privacy and data sharing going forward.

Perhaps sites like Blippy and Boutiques.com were ahead of their time when it came to consumers willingly handing over the keys to their shopping and payment preferences. I envision a day when there will be an app that reads all of your purchase history via your email account and then serves you recommendations based on this data. There are some companies who are already parsing through receipts in your inbox to organize purchases, so why not take this a step further.

And these personalization strategies that are being adopted by retailers are already trickling down to other kinds of sites beyond e-commerce as well. In the same way that ecommerce sites are trying to maximize sales and profits with this data, content sites are also using social and other data to add relevance to their platforms.

So shoppers, be prepared to give up your data. In the coming year, we’re going to see many more retail sites ramping up data-driven discovery. And e-commerce sites who aren’t thinking about how to mine social and other forms of data are probably going to be left in the dust by the Amazons and Netflix’s of the next wave of personalization.

After some fairly sizable blunders last summer, Netflix suffered for the remainder of 2011, as its stock price took a serious dive and subscribers left in droves. That’s why it was at least a bit of a surprise when Netflix bounced back today in its fourth quarter earnings — beating Wall Street’s projections — in spite of expected losses throughout 2012 thanks to the costs of rolling out its service internationally (among other things).

Of course, while the creation of Qwikster (and splitting its DVD and streaming businesses) may seem ill-conceived in retrospect, as Erick pointed out today, Netflix’s Q4 earnings show that the company had some not-so-trivial economic incentives for separating the two. Breaking out DVD vs. streaming for the first time in Q4, Netflix showed that the two businesses have drastically different margins, with streaming at an 11 percent profit margin, compared to 52 percent for its DVD business.

On the other hand, everyone knows that streaming content has a far brighter future than DVDs, so likely Netflix (and others) just have to “bite the bullet” on that front, right? After all, when CEO Reed Hastings was asked about the future of DVD profitability and subscriber share on Netflix’s 4Q earnings call this afternoon, he simply stated: “We expect DVD Subscribers to decline every quarter … forever.”

In the last quarter of 2011, for instance, the DVD business lost 2.76 million subscribers, while streaming gained 220K. While it hopes streaming subscription rates will pick up over the next year (both domestically and internationally), there’s no reason to think that the declining DVD numbers are going to change.

Yet, the DVD business has fixed costs, and Netflix is forced to continuously jockey for rights to streaming content, so, in the near term, one would think that its DVD business would be significantly more profitable; however, Hastings said that, in reality, it’s just the opposite.

Streaming subscribers now outnumber DVD subscribers 2:1, and the CEO said that the marginal streaming subscriber is “almost pure contribution,” whereas the average DVD subscriber leads to a number of variable costs.

“Profitability of each new streaming subscriber is almost twice what it is for DVDs … we’d obviously like them to do both, but if they’re only going to use one, we’d much prefer they use streaming,” he said.

Netflix will continue to focus on international expansion, and even though the cost of expansion will hamstring earnings results over the next year, leadership believes strongly in the opportunity abroad. Although Amazon acquired LoveFilm (the U.K.’s answer to Netflix) last year, the leaders believe that LoveFilm’s business is still predominantly DVD-based. Profitability, Hastings said, is naturally based on competitive barriers and scale.

While they think that LoveFilm and others obviously pose a few competitive barriers, they’re mostly low, so the opportunity to sieze the streaming market internationally is potentially huge, and likely extremely profitable. Basically, Hastings words imply that Netflix doesn’t really see any sizable competition abroad in terms of on-demand video streaming at scale, so they’re investing aggressively to be “early in the game.”

Hastings and Chief Financial Officer David Wells made a few other interesting points during the investor call today. One being that, although they now believe that splitting the business was a mistake, they continue to stand by their 60 percent price increase last July, which was really the primary driver behind the exodus of subscribers Netflix experienced for the remainder of the year. Since then, Netflix’s stock dove from around $300 a share to under $70. Yikes.

However, Wells said that if he had it to do all over, he’d make the same decision again. I get it … the whole staying on message thing, hindsight is 20/20, etc. etc., but Netflix is still dangerously close to losing customers if their content doesn’t improve significantly. It’s difficult to compete with the cable networks for exclusivity rights, but their streaming selection still pales in comparison to DVDs.

Another point of interest includes the fact that, while smart TV streaming is the fastest growing segment of its business and 3-D streaming will be a big future play, Netflix has no plans to go into video game rental, which was to be a new feature of Qwikster. Some might think that, with the scale of its distribution, Netflix could easily enter the video game rental market and quickly begin undercutting the competition. But not so, according to the executives. Redbox and Gamefly will obviously quite relieved to hear this news. (At least for now.)

A second inquiry on today’s call asked Hastings and Wells why they weren’t considering a la carte options (i.e. pay-per-view), insinuating that it might help them become a one-stop-shop for movies and TV shows. This is an interesting subject, considering an example many of us have probably experienced. If you don’t have Tivo and you happen to miss an episode of a TV series you love to watch, and you want to watch for free, oft-times you’re out of luck, with Hulu and some of the big cable networks as exceptions. Hastings and Wells seemed to imply that networks are only going to increasingly offer their shows right after they air on their own websites (something which is growing in popularity, check out Fox, for example).

If Netflix were to offer pay-per-view episodes of Mad Men right after they air, isn’t this something that customers would love? Probably, but Hulu has already won a lot of these rights (most of which are exclusive in video streaming). And Hastings said that he thinks that there isn’t a lot of brand strength in “being everything for everyone,” and being unlimited streaming video for a low fee is the core of their brand proposition — adding pay-per-view would confuse both the brand identity and its customers.

With Vudu, Amazon, Blockbuster, and more already in the game there is a huge list of companies already offering pay-per-view, he said, and “we don’t think we have a way to do it any better.”

“In some sense it’s niche,” the CEO said, “but it’s a very big niche, which we think we can lead.” Dolby Digital came to mind, he said, as an example of what Netflix wants to do — be on every platform, and get along with everyone. Clearly, this was another way of saying that, at this point, pay-per-view would put strain on its relationships, and the potential customer acquisition that it could catalyze isn’t worth the cost.

Listen to the webcast here.

Saying 2011 was a rocky road for Netflix would be an understatement, as it split its DVD and streaming offerings into two businesses, then reneged. They also hiked their prices, only to experience a veritable customer revolt, and CEO Reed Hastings was forced to publicly say that they’d made a huge mistake.

Today, Netflix has released its fourth quarter earnings from 2011, and it looks like there’s at least a sliver of good news, as the company beat Wall Street’s forecasts of $0.54 a share and $857 million in revenues, rising instead to $0.73 per share and $876 million in revenues (a 47 percent increase from the year prior).

In its letter to shareholders this afternoon, Netflix said that it saw a rise in streaming members in the U.S., up 220,000 to 21.67 million in the fourth quarter. In October and November, growth was slow, but December was kinder to Netflix, as the company said that it “returned to positive net streaming additions,” boosted by strong seasonal growth additions and exceeded its own forecasts. More importantly, based on its exodus last year, Netflix saw fewer streaming cancellations, as well as a lower rate of migration to DVD-only plans.

All in all, domestic streaming reached nearly 22 million subscriptions, adding a total of 610K, while domestic DVD subscriptions came in at 11.7 million, with international subscriptions at 1.86 million. In relation to the latter, Netflix has warned that it will lose money throughout 2012 as it ramps up its international content, and as DVD subscriptions continue to underperform: “We expect modest quarterly losses, as well as losses for the calendar year,” the company said in its shareholder letter. Due to international expansion, particularly in its launch in the UK, Netflix expects a consolidated loss of between $9 and $27 million in the first quarter.

The company sustained a sharp decline in DVD members in the fourth quarter and thus expects DVD revenues in the first quarter to decline at approximately the same rate, while streaming revenues will increase, with an expected flat sequential revenue in the first quarter.

In total, Netflix ended 2011 with 24.4 million subscribers in the U.S., which was up 25 percent from 2010, and rose from 23.79 total domestic subscriptions in the third quarter. All things considered, this is a good sign for Netflix, especially as it attempts to recover from the whopping 800K subscribers it lost in the third quarter. Although 2012 will continue to be shaky, it seems that the company has at least regained some trust, and is seeing stronger growth.

As to how shareholders are taking the news? Today, Netflix’s stock rose by $3 per share, up 2.37 percent, and in after hours trading, the stock is up 13 percent to $108 a share — another good sign, as shareholders seem at least somewhat contented by the company’s outlook going forward.

The earnings report comes on the heels of some management changes for Netflix, as the company announced last week that its Leslie Kilgore, its CMO for the last 12 years, would be joining the Netflix board as a nonexecutive director. Jessie Becker was appointed interim CMO, and Jonathan Friedland would be promoted to Chief Communications Officer.

Another thing that Netflix may have to contend with in the near future: Amazon. The New York Post published an article today saying that Jeff Bezos and company are seriously considering a move to expand the company’s streaming service, potentially even carving it out as a standalone, subscription-based operation.

In January of last year, Amazon acquired LoveFilm, a U.K. version of Netflix, and some expected at the time that Amazon would eventually rebrand the service, taking advantage of its strong European presence in the video streaming and rental markets. There’s no doubt that Amazon is positioning itself as a major competitor to Netflix, and with its growing clout as a media company, backed by the addition of its new Kindles, Netflix has reason to be nervous.

It’s strong push into international markets could be very important to Netflix in the long term, even if that means lower forecasts and declining profits over the next few quarters. Today, however, shareholders are a bit happier, and Netflix may just be proving that its regaining its footing.

Updating in realtime. We’ll also be listening in on Netflix’s earnings call at 3pm PT/6pm ET.

One day after Netflix made its debut in the UK and Ireland, Roku has announced that two of its streaming players, the Roku LT and the Roku 2 XS, are heading to Britain too and are already available for pre-order on Amazon.

The Roku LT, which is billed as the lowest-cost option for streaming video and music directly to a TV, over Wi-Fi and without a PC, retails at £49.99. The Roku 2 XS, which adds casual games like Angry Birds to the offering and also sports an Ethernet, a MicroSD and a USB port, costs £99.99.

Both the Roku LT and the Roku 2 XS connect to standard-definition or high-definition TVs via RCA or HDMI. Both models are expected to ship at the end of January, and additional retailers will be announced later, the company said in a statement.

Roku currently features more than 40 channels of content in the UK and Ireland, including on-demand films and shows from Netflix and Crackle (UK only), live sorts from MLB.TV, photos and video from Facebook and Flickr and more.

For your reference, Roku boasts over 400 channels in the United States today.

One day after Netflix made its debut in the UK and Ireland, Roku has announced that two of its streaming players, the Roku LT and the Roku 2 XS, are heading to Britain too and are already available for pre-order on Amazon.

The Roku LT, which is billed as the lowest-cost option for streaming video and music directly to a TV, over Wi-Fi and without a PC, retails at £49.99. The Roku 2 XS, which adds casual games like Angry Birds to the offering and also sports an Ethernet, a MicroSD and a USB port, costs £99.99.

Both the Roku LT and the Roku 2 XS connect to standard-definition or high-definition TVs via RCA or HDMI. Both models are expected to ship at the end of January, and additional retailers will be announced later, the company said in a statement.

Roku currently features more than 40 channels of content in the UK and Ireland, including on-demand films and shows from Netflix and Crackle (UK only), live sorts from MLB.TV, photos and video from Facebook and Flickr and more.

For your reference, Roku boasts over 400 channels in the United States today.