Netflix now has more than 36 million subscribers and as part of developing and improving their service they will be offering a new plan for big families who are not satisfied with their $7.99 per month plan which enables streaming to just 2 devices simultaneously.

In a quarterly letter to shareholders, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings says:

“A few members with large families run into our 2-simultaneous-stream limit. To best serve these members, we’re shortly adding a 4-stream plan, at $11.99 in the U.S., and we expect fewer than 1% of members to take it”.

So, for an additional 4 dollars, users of the same account will be able to watch 4 video streams at the same time. Netflix believes that only 1% of their customers will be interested in this option, but they might not have thought about customers who let their friends or relatives use their accounts.

Furthermore, in the letter, Hastings is also talking about a new “profiles” feature which is currently being tested. This feature, which will be available globally sometime in the future, will allow different users of an account to get individual recommendations based on their viewing habits. This would of course go well with the new plan.

Are you interested in this new plan, especially for a household that is using services like Netflix and Hulu as a complete alternative to traditional cable?

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Nobody is sure about what changes are going to happen to Hulu in the future, since News Corp. and Disney are still making decisions. But we have got confirmation about one thing. When CEO Jason Kilar steps down Andy Forssell, senior vice president of content, will take over as acting CEO.

Kilar wrote on the Hulu blog, “Andy exemplifies the Hulu culture and has been central to Hulu’s journey, helping to grow this company from two content partners and no revenue to over 450 content partners and approximately $700 million revenue in 2012“.

About the Hulu part-owners Disney and News Corporation, Kilar is saying that they are finalizing “forward-looking plans” with the website. As you might know, the two companies have disagreements about Hulu’s direction. While Disney is planning for an ad-supported future, News Corp. wants to increase Hulu’s paid subscribers.

Kilar announced back in January that he will be leaving the company, and he has announced that he will depart “at the end of this quarter”. There hasn’t been any announcement about whether Forssell will get the job permanently. According to Kilar, the matter will only be discussed after Hulu’s future is decided.

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Hulu is already not as popular as rival Netflix and there will be more competition from Amazon and the Redbox Instant service, and now the future of the service itself has become uncertain due to problems from the inside.

According to available info, News Corp. and Disney, the two companies which each own roughly a third of Hulu, have started discussing the future of the service and their own stakes in the company. The two companies have plans to purchase the other’s stake or sell it to an outside company. Apparently, they have disagreements regarding the direction in which Hulu should go.

Currently, Hulu offers a free version and also a Hulu Plus subscription service and both the offerings include ads. The disagreement between the two companies is that Disney prefers an ad-supported strategy, while News Corp. feels that the focus should be on subscriptions. In the case of subscriptions, Hulu with just 3 million subscribers is nowhere near Netflix’s 27 million.

Hulu’s CEO Jason Kilar and CTO Tom Rich earlier announced their plans to step down from the company. So the future of the service might only be decided after its new CEO and CTO are announced, possibly along with new owners as well. Till then uncertainty surrounds Hulu.

Do you use Hulu regularly? Do you subscribe to Hulu Plus?

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For many people Facebook is a way to share your life via digital communication, but now you may be able to share your life more literally.  A new Facebook tool unveiled by CEO Mark Zuckerberg in the Good Morning America has “the power to save lives”  by letting users donate organs.

The company has revealed that they will allow users to state on their Timeline that they are registered to donate their organs after death. You will be able to reveal which state you have registered in, the date that you registered, and also explain why you decided to become a donor. And those of you who haven’t registered as a donor will be able to do so via the links added by Facebook.

According to Facebook, “With the addition of “organ donor” to the Life Events section of timeline, you can state your intention to become an organ donor, and share your story about when, where or why you decided to become a donor. If you are not officially registered as an organ donor, sign up with the appropriate registry”.

This is certainly an interesting move by Facebook, and it is also probably not what most people had in mind about what was coming. And of course patients have been using the social networking site to find donors for some time now, but the new feature will most likely become popular quickly and dramatically increase the number of registrations.

Facebook says that the new feature will only be available in some countries at first, like the US and UK, but will be rolled out to other areas around the world later on.

Check out the video to know more about the new tool.

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Founder and CEO of Amazon.com, Jeff Bezos is, as you know, a billionaire. And that is why when most other people work overtime for paying the monthly rent, he gets to do interesting stuff like raising rocket engines from the bottom of the ocean. Bezos has announced that his exploration team has found the five F-1 rockets that carried the Apollo 11 rocket into space.

The F-1 rockets lifted the Apollo 11 mission spaceward with one and a half million pounds of thrust, and 32 million horsepower, back in 1969, before plunging into the Atlantic. Bezos, who watched the moon landing when he was just 5 years old, doesn’t want the story of the rockets to end there. That’s why he decided to fund the project to locate the rockets.

He wrote in his blog: “I’m excited to report that, using state-of-the-art deep sea sonar, the team has found the Apollo 11 engines lying 14,000 feet below the surface, and we’re making plans to attempt to raise one or more of them from the ocean floor. We don’t know yet what condition these engines might be in – they hit the ocean at high velocity and have been in salt water for more than 40 years. On the other hand, they’re made of tough stuff, so we’ll see”.

If his team manages to lift the rockets from the ocean floor, he won’t be able to keep them as they still belong to NASA. If one is raised, it might touch down at Smithsonian. If there’s a second one, it might end up in the Museum of Flight in Seattle. It will be interesting if a third one is recovered and is available from Amazon for a few million dollars.

But there’s something that puzzles us. NASA conducted various launches in the past and we are pretty sure that there are many F-1 rockets at the bottom of the ocean. We wonder how Bezos and his team found out that the rockets they located are the ones from Apollo 11.

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