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Well, it's official. Netflix has entered the original programming game and is no longer just a distributor of other companies' content. "Lilyhammer," a dramatic comedy starring "Sopranos" actor Steven Van Zandt, went live on Sunday. For the first time, the following words have appeared on the opening credits to a television-style show: "A Netflix original series."

Rather than being broadcast on HBO, a standard cable channel or even network TV, "Lilyhammer" is going straight to audiences via the Web. Netflix hopes that by making some content available exclusively through its service, it will attract new users and potentially even gain some additional leverage with other content providers.

When Netflix announced its plan last month to spin off its DVD rental business into a an entirely seperate subsidiary called Qwikster, customers were not pleased. The company's recent subscription price hike had already irked customers, causing about 1 million of them to quit the service.

Having heard those complaints loud and clear, the company has decided to axe Qwikster altogether and keep their DVD rental service as part of the Netflix brand. This summer's price hike will stay in place, but the company hopes to stop the slow exodous of customers by capitulating on the Qwikster issue, which had proved wildly unpopular.

It used to be that Netflix account holders could share their logins with friends and family, allowing multiple people to stream content from the same account simultaneously. That may not be the case for long, at least according to consumer advocacy blog Stop the Cap!

Some users reported recently that their attempts to stream content to multiple devices simultaneously were met with an error message telling them they weren't allowed to do so. As it rolls out its controversial pricing plan changes, the company may be tightening the screws on viewers who abuse the system by piggybacking on somebody else's subscription. The change will also have an impact on families, who often share the same Netflix account across devices.

After two years of waiting, the U.S. market finally gets a chance to try out Spotify, the music-streaming service that's now wildly popular Europe. But why is there so much hype around Spotify, you may wonder? Don't we already have plenty of music streaming services here, like Pandora, Last.fm, Slacker Radio, MOG and Rdio, for example?

Sure we do. But we've never had anything like Spotify before.

With the story yesterday about the Netflix price increase, I thought it would be an interesting exercise to examine what is the total cost of my entertainment and communications package and what the actual overall impact would be of the price increase.

My wife and I are empty nesters, but we have a cell plan that also includes my stepson. The three cell phones cost us $175 per month with AT&T, and that is for my iPhone data plan and messaging plans. We live in an urban area where we can choose between DSL and cable options, although in our apartment building AT&T DSL/U-Verse is our only choice for Internet connectivity unless we want to go to a broadband wireless plan.

Netflix announced this morning that it is changing its pricing structure for DVD and streaming videos. Starting Sept.1, unlimited movie streaming and DVD-by-mail will be separate options costing $7.99 a month with the option of combining the two for $15.98 a month, or double what a standard Netflix subscription now costs. The announcement comes as a surprise to those that thought that Netflix would eventually kill off its DVD-by-mail business and only offer streaming video.

It was inevitable that Netflix would change its pricing structure. The company started as a DVD-by-mail operation at $7.99 a month and operated with that as its primary business model until the unlimited-streaming option became available in 2008. It is a wonder that it took this long for Netflix to unbundle the two options and make them separate sources of revenue.

Pogoplug, from a company called Cloud Engines, is the name of the external USB drive that makes all your files available on the Internet. But now, Cloud Engines is moving into the software space with a new personal cloud product that comes hardware-free. Like the previous service, Pogoplug will let you stream your photo, video and music libraries from any computer connected to the Internet. But in this case, the libraries are stored on your own computer, not an external drive.

Ning announced a new feature today that will enable its users to broadcast video directly from their sites. The capabilities are a result of a partnership with Ustream, bringing the live streaming video capabilities to the social networking platform.

The Ustream integration will let Ning users embed both live and recorded video into their sites. In addition to the video content, the new feature will also make available live chats so that people watching the event can also participate.

There was a lot of buzz prior to today's announcements at WWDC about the deals that Apple had reportedly struck with the major record labels. Even before any Apple executives took the stage, many industry observers had crowned Apple the heir apparent to music in the cloud, decreeing that its offerings would surely trump those recently announced by Google and Amazon.

But now that the dust has settled and the glimmer has faded from today's keynote at WWDC, we have to ask, has Apple really triumphed here? Did we see the future of digital music unveiled onstage?

In the battle of cloud music services, you have a variety of options including radio service like Pandora and Last.fm, online lockers like Google Music and Amazon Cloud Drive, Internet radio stations and premium, "program-your-own" services like MOG, Rdio, Rhapsody and Zune. But what if you want it all? Then you may want to consider mSpot and its recently updated mobile app for Android.