Amar Toor report­ing for The Verge:

Accord­ing to analy­sis from Need­ham & Co., it’s like­ly that Net­flix’s paid US sub­scriber base reached 30 mil­lion by the end of Sep­tem­ber. That may be enough to over­take HBO, which has an esti­mat­ed 28.7 mil­lion sub­scribers in the US…

In its fis­cal Q2 earn­ings report this year, Net­flix said it had more than 29 mil­lion US sub­scribers and expect­ed to add between 230,000 and 880,000 in Q3. 

Net­flix is one of those com­pa­nies that I love to root for. How­ev­er, as some­one in the com­ments for this arti­cle point­ed out, the fact that Net­flix has more sub­scribers than HBO, does­n’t mean they’re mak­ing more mon­ey. Still, these num­bers might just give HBO the scare they need, to con­sid­er an online sub­scrip­tion that isn’t tied to any cable com­pa­ny. With Time Warn­er Cable being the par­ent com­pa­ny of HBO, I see this as a small prob­a­bil­i­ty, but there’s no way they don’t see the poten­tial busi­ness they’re miss­ing out on.

One thing is for sure, the com­pe­ti­tion between these two chan­nels will be inter­est­ing to watch.