by Sahil Patel
For Netflix and its CEO Reed Hastings, HBO is Goliath, which makes for a fun read whenever the company passes a new milestone or HBO metric and Hastings takes to his Facebook page to highlight it. (Albania takes it up a notch comes to mind — posted shortly after Netflix received its first Emmy nominations last year.)
The latest is a pretty good one, too: According to Hastings {link no longer active}, Netflix edged out HBO last quarter in terms of subscriber revenue. In Q2, Netflix made $1.146 billion, compared to HBO’s $1.141 billion.
Don’t count out HBO, though. It still has $578 million in quarterly profits and 99 Emmy nominations to keep it comfortable. By comparison, Netflix made $71 million last quarter, and netted 31 nominations at this year’s Primetime Emmy Awards. Hastings is aware of that, and notes it in his post.
That said, HBO remains the clear target for Netflix. As the company’s chief content officer Ted Sarandos said in an earlier GQ profile: “The goal is to become HBO faster than HBO can become us.”
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