Well that would have ruined the whole point of the article. HBO accounts for 25% of all of Time Warner's profits. That's significantly more than what Netflix can offer. And it would also be useful if they did the revenue per user figure -- but again, that wouldn't be a tweet-worthy and sexy headline. (It would have also required the author to understand the content business but I digress).
the netflix numbers are actually pretty easy. At $8/months, it's ~$96/year ... which is close enough to $100 to make for easy math.
Quick and dirty numbers (on just the domestic streaming).
At 30M subs, run rate revenue is approximately $3B. They had about $2B in content commitments. Delivery costs (i.e. bandwidth) runs about 20% of revenue. So on their $3B, $600M goes to delivery, $2B goes to content, and they have $400M-ish in profits.
NFLX is difficult to value because it's growing so fast and the content cost is a moving target. If NFLX can keep content costs around $2B, then every incremental customer is 80% profit. Every 1M subs they add, is $100M in revenue and $80M in profit (capitalize that at 10x and you're adding $800M in valuation ... keep in mind they added 2M domestic subs in the last 3 months). Some people argue that content providers will demand higher fees as NFLX increases subscribers. I'm not convinced. They walked away from Starz and they cut a deal with Disney that doesn't look any more expensive than what they were paying previously. And they're also building a library of owned content.
It's definitely one of the most interesting stories to watch.
