By one million users.

And the bulk of those users that Netflix expects to flee are subscribers to the DVD service. There, they project a lost of 800,000 subscribers. As far as streaming service subscribers, they project a loss of 200,000.

It’s pretty easy to draw a connection between this new projection and Netflix’s big move back in July to split the streaming and DVD plans into two separate entities, basically raising the prices for anyone who wanted to keep both. That plan went into effect September 1st.

That decision sparked an internet freak-out, as people took to blogs and social media and swore to the heavens that they would be cancelling Netflix and wishing a plague on the house of Reed Hastings. The backlash was severe, to say the least. An independent analysis group guesstimated that this move could cost Netflix 2 to 2.5 million subscribers.

And now we see Netflix lowering its domestic projections by about 4%. Is this really nothing to worry about, or has Netflix screwed itself?

Apparently, investors aren’t too thrilled about the new estimates. At midday today, NFLX stock dove 17%.

Here’s the letter to shareholders (Thanks Hacking NetFlix)

On the day that the new prices went into effect, Netflix dropped another bomb: They will be losing all of their Starz content early next year. Negotiations to renew that contract stalled as Netflix refused to give Starz a tiered subscriber format within their service.

In pre-market trading, shares declined by as much as 4%. At the time of this writing, they’re down -2.54% or -9.55 at 376.18.

While Apple is expected to do well financially in the short term, riding on the success of recent product innovations, there is concern that the company will greatly miss the tremendous input Jobs has given to such innovations. In other words, the question is how long can Apple maintain its luster without Steve Jobs?

Tim Cook, who took over day-to-day operations at the company when Jobs took a medical leave of absence early this year, has of course been named CEO by Apple’s board. He has been said to know more about the company than anyone other than Steve Jobs himself. He certainly has Jobs’ blessing.

The full text of Jobs’ letter is below:

Steve 

The call comes less than a week after rival Google’s most recent earnings report. In Google’s conference call, CEO Larry Page announced that Android activations were up to 550,000 phones activated a day (he said “phones” not devices, but not certain whether or not that includes tablets).

Apple will no doubt give the latest numbers on iOS devices.

Apple stock is doing pretty well ahead of the report. There have been some questions about the upcoming report surrounding the fact that Apple didn’t release a new iPhone yet, as they had for previous June reports, but clearly, there is a lot of optimism. The new iPhone is of course expected in September.

It can’t hurt that a new survey this week found that smartphone buyers want Apple over Android.

Stock hit an all-time high yesterday, nearing a 350 BIllion Market Cap, and it’s up in morning trading.

We’ll cover Apple’s report today as it’s released.

Would acquiring Sony be a good move for Apple? Your thoughts.

According to Reuters, Apple currently has $50 billion in cash reserves while Sony has a market cap of $34 billion. So, financially speaking, Sony is a strong possibility for Apple.

Do you think Apple will acquire Sony? Let us know.

Google has also announced an employee option exchange program. "Recognizing that about 85% of our employees have at least some stock options that are underwater (i.e., have an exercise price higher than the current market price of our common stock), we plan to offer our employees the opportunity to exchange those options," says Laszlo Bock, VP, People Operations.

According to the announcement, here’s how the program would work:

- This will be a one-for-one, voluntary exchange. Employees will be able to exchange part or all of an existing option grant for the same number of new options.

– The offer period will begin on January 29, 2009 and end at 6:00 a.m. Pacific Time on March 3, 2009, unless Google is required or opts to extend the offer period.

– Based on this expected timeline, employees will be able to exchange their underwater options for new options with a strike price equal to the closing price of our stock on March 2, 2009.
 
– The new options will have a new vesting schedule that adds 12 months to the original vesting schedule. In addition, new options will vest no sooner than 6 months after the close of the offer period.

– Generally, all Googlers with options are eligible to participate (Eric Schmidt, Sergey Brin, and Larry Page do not hold options) except where precluded by legal and tax issues in certain countries. We are working to address these issues and the final offer documentation will specify any countries in which we are not able to offer the program.

– This option exchange program has been approved by our Board of Directors.

Google has a FAQ page for the program in place here. Actually, it’s a PDF document.

The proxy fight is expected to shake up CNet, whose shares have underperformed the market and its competitors, leaving investors with a 19 percent loss over the last three years while other Internet-related companies grew.

According to the article CNET has rejected the offer because it does not pay a premium above its current stock price.

Previous story….

In a common Matt Drudge move an unlinked headline appeared just after midnight on the Drudge Report suggesting investors are plotting management changes at CNET.

The text reads:

"INVESTORS MAY BE SEEKING A TAKEOVER OF CNET... DEVELOPING..."

It is likely that Drudge was tipped by a news story in progress that will appear later tonight on the web and in papers early tomorrow. Time will tell.

CNET has been the subject of rumors and speculation for months and a recent analysts stock downgrade did not help.

After spending some time paging through parts of MSN Money while chatting with Jolley, we can see his point. The site does have some nice data integration from the sources that someone researching financial info would turn to individually.

The consumer focus of MSN Money probably made it easier for investors to keep heading to the site that dominates the online world of financial information. Yahoo Finance has been planted atop that list for quite some time.

MSN Money has its appeals, and Jolley wanted to bring them to our attention (and to yours by proxy, of course.) He started off by citing unique content, written by folks like Jim Jubak.

A couple of gems reside in the MSN Money list of Investment Tools. The Stock Research Wizard pulls information from Zacks Investment Research, comScore, and Reuters to build a profile of a company and its stock.

Stock history, price targets, and catalysts preceded an interesting comparison feature. Visitors can quickly bring up a comparison of a stock and two others. Stacked against each other, people see how the stocks compare in estimates to gain, shares priced cheapest relative to earnings, and other factors.

Exchange-traded funds have been around for a few years, and have gained a section on MSN Money. On the research page about them, visitors can easily see the winners and losers, and how various asset classes have been performing.

Jolley told us multimedia, as in videos, will be one of the ways Microsoft has in mind to bolster the site and gain against Yahoo Finance. These likely have space selected for them on the MSN Money homepage as well as other pages throughout the site.

MSN Money doesn’t go for the muted colors like the Wall Street Journal or even Yahoo Finance use. That could be part of the public perception, but MSN Money enjoys significant traffic now. They need to get more to overcome Yahoo and stave off the challenge of AOL Finance and other sites.

Here is analysis from Hitwise for US visits to Business & Finance sites for the week ending 12/15/2007:

Engadget had "it on authority" via a supposed Apple internal email that turned up bogus. Engadget writer Ryan Block’s gaffe sent Apple stock plummeting by four-and-a-half bucks just as New York brokers were about to break for lunch.

Apple said the email was "a fake" and did not come from them. Engadget was quick to correct the error, and Apple stock recovered significantly by half-past noon.

Blogging, then, as a medium, you might say has finally arrived. If a 96-word post can tank a stock immediately, investors, companies, bloggers and regulators are sure to take greater notice.

MarketWatch Seeks Community ‘MarketPerception’

Visiting MarketWatch online to see how the stock for Google happens to be doing presents the visitor with a voting option. "Will GOOG close Up or Down from its current price on the next trading day?" the just-debuted MarketPerception feature asks.

People can click up or down, and the MarketPerception box then shows the current vote totals. At press time, 69 percent of 437 voters think Google will finish up from the quote they viewed.

The curious visitor can click to view more MarketPerception results, on its Community Sentiment page. Users can make further predictions on other stocks from here. They can also see which stocks are hot based on recent voting, what the most popular stocks have been during the trading day, and the symbols receiving the most bullish and bearish sentiment.

MarketWatch owner Dow Jones said in a statement, "Future enhancements to MarketPerception will allow registered MarketWatch users to aggregate and share these predictions in a community setting, among other tasks."

They also made a change to their search functionality, making it a little more aware of the requests users make while going from two different search boxes to one. That makes it more convenient when hunting for publicly-traded company information; no more entering the company name in the symbol search box by mistake.

Dow Jones as a whole has been slowly moving toward a more open content scheme. It’s virtually a given these days that a feature story on Google will be placed in the public area of the Wall Street Journal rather than behind the subscription wall.

The recent addition of the Deal Journal to their blog lineup brings their active roster of blogs up to an even dozen. It’s a low percentage of the content available to paid subscribers, but compared to years past when nothing from the WSJ made it outside the subscription wall, this is another positive step toward embracing more readers in the Journal’s niche.