Netflix is now offering a DVD-only subscription plan, starting at $7.99 per month.

Santosh Hegde, Director of DVD Engineering at Netflix, states that beginning today, subscribers can have access to roughly 100,000 DVD and Blu-Ray titles directly, separate from a streaming content subscription. Netflix is also offering a free monthlong trial to eligible subscribers.

Netflix had been in the news quite a bit in 2011, mostly for reasons relative to making their customer base very angry. Last July, the company cancelled their $9.99 all-you-can-watch plan, and completely split their DVD for mail from it’s streaming service, called it Qwikster, and priced both at $7.99 a pop per service. This put a sort of supersaver combo $15.98, roughly a 60% price increase overnight. Some 800,000 customers were promptly lost, to much publicity. Still, Netflix was able to report Q4 earnings for 2011, and exceeded the profit expectations of Wall Street analysts by about $20 million, even though a large amount of subscriptions were lost.

Interestingly, isn’t the new Netflix deal at $7.99 for unlimited DVD’s basically the exact same thing as Qwikster?