Rejoice, cord-cutters. HBO has announced it will launch its own online video streaming service next year, no cable TV subscription needed. 
 
 Until now, HBO's streaming service, HBO GO, has required users to have an HBO subscription, but in an investor meeting on Wednesday, HBO chairman and CEO Richard Plepler acknowledged that this model excludes the some 10 million homes in the U.S. that are now broadband-only. And that number is only expected to grow. "That is a large and growing opportunity that should no longer be left untapped," Plepler said. "It is time to remove all barriers to those who want HBO." 
 
 For those who have been watching the cord-cutter revolution, HBO's move is a long time coming. The HBO GO subscription model has always felt like a half-baked attempt at the over-the-top TV market. Plus, a poorly kept secret about HBO GO has always been that you don't really need a subscription to watch unlimited HBO content online. You just need to know someone—or know someone who knows someone—with a subscription and is willing to share his password. That means that a whole lot of us are basically getting full access to HBO without paying a penny. With a standalone service, in other words, HBO will finally be able to collect on all that binge Game of Thrones watching you've been doing on your cousin's boyfriend's roommate's account. 
 
 What's most unusual about this change in events, though, is the fact that many consumers are actually ready and willing the pay HBO for this kind of thing. Two years ago, a site called TakeMyMoneyHbo.com launched, and asked people how much they'd pay for a standalone service. The site got more than 163,000 visitors in the first 48 hours and found that the average person would pay around $12 a month. 
 
 Consumers wanted this service because, with so many options for watching traditional television online—from Netflix to Hulu to Amazon Prime Instant Video—access to HBO has been one of the last remaining reasons to stick with cable. Better to pony up the $12 a month than fork over $120 or more for cable. 
 
 So, why then did HBO take so long to break away from cable? The answer may be that HBO was under tremendous pressure from cable companies, who are finding themselves struggling to compete with the emergence of low-cost services like Netflix. Angering them could potentially jeopardize HBO's relationship with the cable companies, who could then slap HBO with higher fees for carrying their content. 
 
 But in recent years, the power seems to have shifted. As HBO has become more and more beloved and cable companies have become more and more reviled, the odds of HBO winning a fight against a massive cable company are much higher. Many people still subscribe to cable to get HBO, meaning if say, Comcast, were to hit HBO with higher fees or terminate its service, Comcast might very well lose customers, too. 
 
 Meanwhile, another new cultural trend may also be adding to the pressure HBO is feeling to launch such a service. It's not cord cutting, per se, but "cord shaving," a phenomenon recently explored by The Wall Street Journal, in which consumers are keeping cable, but cutting add-on channels like ESPN or the Food Network. As more HBO-quality content emerges from companies like Netflix and Amazon, it's possible that this cord-shaving trend could hit HBO particularly hard if it doesn't act fast. 
 
 HBO already tiptoed toward the unbundled future earlier this year, announcing a deal that would give Amazon Prime members unlimited access to some older HBO content. Now, it seems HBO is ready to fully take the plunge. Details on the new service's name, how much it will cost, and what content will be available are still unclear, but one thing is sure: cable companies should be very, very afraid. ||||| It may not rival Hamlet and King Lear with scholars, but there are few more poignant moments in Shakespeare than when Julius Caesar utters his last words. Literally surrounded by the Senators who have conspired to bring about his downfall, Caesar is devastated as his realizes the betrayal even by his friend Brutus. Thus we hear Caesar’s cry of “Et tu, Brute?” (in Latin, literally “And you, Brutus?”). Of course in the movie (I know, so 20th Century of me) Marlon Brando’s (as Mark Antony) glorious “Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears!” that follows is a classic. 
 
 HBO yesterday dropped the other shoe on cable operators and their multichannel video distributor brethren. They announced that in 2015, you will no longer need to subscribe to HBO through your cable service provider in order to get access to all of HBO’s content online and on mobile devices in the U.S. (HBO has operated in this fashion in Scandinavia through HBO Nordic since last year). So beginning next year, HBO GO(es) OTT (“over the top” or Internet-delivered) and will begin to build its own, direct relationship with U.S. consumers. 
 
 HBO isn’t the first to jab the proverbial shiv into the cable industry ribs, and it’s certainly one that the cable industry (, , etc.) has seen coming for some time. The industry has been increasingly encircled by a growing cast of characters looking to expand OTT options for consumers. This runs the gamut from , which dominates the premium online video landscape with over 50 million subscribers, to Amazon and Hulu, to and DISH (newly announced entrants to the OTT market), to device manufacturers such as Roku, Apple TV and Google Chrome, to content providers World Wrestling Entertainment and Sarah Palin (separately, of course, although recent news reports might suggest a promising joint venture here). But of all the surrounding attackers, the tip of the HBO knife has to hurt just a little bit more than most. 
 
 It may seem like ancient history now, but for many years, cable content was HBO. The cable industry’s origins (as early as the 1940s) were as a simple retransmitter of existing broadcast television stations to areas that due to their geography or topography (rural areas distant from big city broadcasters, valleys, etc.) received no or hard-to-watch broadcast signals. It wasn’t until HBO went up on a satellite in 1972 that “cable” meant something more than clearer pictures. If you wanted to see high quality content not on broadcast television, such as top movies and big boxing matches, you had to have HBO. It helped drive cable subscriptions years before ESPN, CNN, Discovery, USA and their brethren were anything more than business plans and spreadsheets. And of course cable helped HBO by providing the literal pathway into subscriber homes with their wires. 
 
 HBO had professed for some time that it would never seek to undermine its longtime relationships with the multichannel distributors to whom it has traditionally relied on for reaching U.S. subscribers. But the rise of popularity and usage of online video, especially among younger people, has been undeniable for some time. If cable helped father HBO’s success (and vice versa) it wasn’t enough to overcome “mother” (remember that necessity is the “mother of invention”). 
 
 So with HBO setting a new course, have we now hit the proverbial tipping point, and is that the end of cable? These things never play out as quickly as we think, and in fact I think winners and losers may end up being a little surprising here. My initial scorecard is as follows: 
 
 Big winner: HBO 
 
 This one isn’t brain surgery. There are roughly 30 million HBO subscribers today (through cable, satellite and telco) generating nearly $5 billion in revenue and nearly $2 billion in profit. Yet the US has roughly 132 million households and nearly 240 million adults over the age of 18. There is a vast untapped market for HBO GO (or HBO “Go-it-alone” as some have dubbed it). And remember that HBO gets virtually all of the revenue from this independent service – no need to share with any multichannel video provider friends. Whether this ultimately cannibalizes multichannel video (and for the reasons below, I don’t think that happens so rapidly), or just creates a new market, HBO will go nowhere but up with this move. 
 
 Small winners: Netflix and Hulu 
 
 Say what? Aren’t these HBO’s biggest competitors and don’t they stand to lose the most by HBO entering their OTT turf? Although Netflix took a hit in the market yesterday (who didn’t?), I attribute this much more to the short-term fallout from their recent price increase. HBO will now make OTT a much more mainstream option for millions of Americans than just an early adopter, “anti-cable” move. For those foregoing traditional multichannel video, they will begin to examine more closely the value proposition of putting together their own online “packages” to include HBO GO and some of their competitors as well. 
 
 Small loser: Comcast, Charter, other multichannel video providers 
 
 It may seem on the surface like cable and their multichannel fellow travelers will be devastated by this move, and I certainly think it carries the emotional baggage I outlined above. But from a practical perspective, it’s not quite so cataclysmic. The numbers of U.S. households dropping multichannel video has been growing at a relatively light pace. The top 13 of these providers lost 105,000 subs in 2013 representing 0.1% of their total of 94.6 million subscribers. For millions of Americans (the average American still watches roughly 5 hours per day of live television, including but not limited to live sports (through ESPN and all of the broadcast networks), they still aren’t going to find that “no cable” is a good enough solution. I think the new HBO OTT service has much more impact on those who otherwise have no interest in subscribing to traditional multichannel video – not good news for cable and co., but not a quick lethal blow either. Look for more creative responses to come from cable. 
 
 Big loser: Amazon 
 
 The party that has to really feel like the betrayed spouse right now must be Amazon. Just last April, Amazon and HBO announced a deal for a selection of HBO content to be made available on Amazon Prime. We don’t know the payment terms, but now pretty quickly you’ll be able to get virtually all HBO content from HBO directly. They will benefit like Netflix and Hulu from the overall focus on the OTT marketplace, but their recent deal seems ridiculous now – their HBO content will serve as an ad for a way to get all HBO content. It’s never easy to feel sorry for Amazon, but they look like losers on this one. ||||| Call it the paradox of cable TV. As a medium, cable has been enjoying its so-called "Golden Age," with complex, immaculately produced dramas like Breaking Bad, Mad Men, Girls, True Detective, and The Walking Dead earning impressive ratings and critical acclaim. But as a video delivery service, it’s on the brink of becoming entirely obsolete. 
 
 HBO just announced that beginning in 2015, it will offer a standalone online streaming service. Thanks to the millions of people who’ve been illegally downloading Game of Thrones or swiping their parents' HBO GO login, the news immediately made headlines. NPR reports, in predictably NPR-y fashion, that “the move would seem to be a big one.” That's an understatement—from where I'm sitting, it’s the death knell for traditional cable television. 
 
 This may seem dubious, seeing as how the news is breaking at the same moment that a Golden Age cable show, The Walking Dead, set a record for cable TV viewing: 17.3 million people watched the season five debut. But all those people were watching something more historic than just the most-viewed cable TV show ever; they were watching the apex of Peak Cable. 
 
 HBO is just the most powerful cable network to allow users to cut the cord and opt for a la carte online viewing. There's been a steady trickle of other networks and services that allow you to do the precisely that. Comedy Central has a new app that allows viewers to access much of its content for free (some of it is still locked for non-cable subscribers), MLB.tv lets you stream baseball games, NFL.com does the same with football, and AMC lets you watch most of its shows, even premium titles like The Walking Dead online after it's aired, for free. TV streaming apps are, according to the New York Times, currently "soaring in popularity." 
 
 With HBO coming to your computer screens, Xbox, and iPads next year, there's almost no conceivable reason you'd need a cable subscription. 
 
 It's about time. As a service, cable is, almost across the board, an ugly, over-priced mess. Cable companies are the most hated in the nation for a reason—they are monopolistic monoliths that offer customers little in the way of choice and terrible service. If you want premium networks, like ESPN or HBO, you pay through the nose for a package and are rewarded with a glut of other channels you never watch. (In the past, cable execs have argued that the resultant subsidization make shows like AMC's Mad Men, which isn’t a ratings behemoth, possible. That won't be the case as much in the future.) 
 
 Personally, I hate my cable company, with a kind of quiet, flaming passion for its incessant stream of irritations to my privileged life. I pay about $100 for a basic cable and high-speed internet package from Comcast, and both are absolute garbage. (The internet is consistently and inexplicably slow, despite my neverending calls to customer service reps, but that is another story.) 
 
 The average American, meanwhile, pays $64 a month for cable, according to the FCC, and that rate is only rising. The International Business Times reports that "the average bill for expanded basic cable rose 5.1 percent" in 2012. “That's about four times the rate of inflation, which rose just 1.6 percent during the same 12-month period, according to the Consumer Price Index." To get premium channels and high-speed internet, Comcast sells packages of up to $159.99 a month. 
 
 This doesn't mean that the internet has triumphed and won us a bullshit-free delivery system for our favorite shows 
 
 That is a lot of money to dole out for a pantheon of channels consumers have little to no control over—and considering that you could probably get nearly all the content you want, a la carte, for probably half that. If you are a baseball fan who likes The Daily Show, SNL, and Breaking Bad, then a monthly subscription to MLB.tv ($9.99), Hulu ($9.99), and Netflix ($8.99) will keep you happy for less than $30 a month. You can beam all of those services and more onto your TV with a cheap little box like Chromecast or Roku, or through an Xbox or BluRay player. 
 
 Then there's my cable. On a given week, I'm not even sure which networks I'll have access to. Some weeks I have TBS, where I'll occasionally watch Seinfeld reruns, some weeks I won't. No ESPN. No FX. No USA. Not that I'd particularly want to watch those networks, but their absence, along with the highly dubious quality of most other cable TV I've encountered, has helped convince me that cable is overpriced, absurd and anachronistic. 
 
 See, as a first-wave "digital native"—just typing that still makes me cringe, but I've more or less accepted my fate—I didn't have a TV for years. After college, my girlfriend and I would just watch stuff on the computer; on Hulu, on Netflix, or, yeah, on one of those virus-laden streaming portals hosted in China (a tip of the hat to you, MegaVideo). Even when we eventually splurged for a flat screen TV, after they became cheap enough, we still just hooked up a BluRay and watched online. This experience was more than satisfactory. 
 
 But we moved, and Comcast sold me on cable when I called for internet. It would only be $20 more they promised, for CNN, TBS (at the time), Comedy Central, and so on. My re-acclimation to cable has taught me many things, the pinnacle of which is: All those years I didn’t have it, I was missing absolutely nothing. CNN is a mind-numbingly terrible news network, my life didn't need more Seinfeld reruns (and I could watch them on Crackle anyway), and Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert were already on Hulu, where I could watch them at my convenience. 
 
 In fact, every kind of content that cable TV produces, the internet usually does better, even when it’s not specifically delivering the same show online. Certainly this is true for news, where Fox, MSNBC, and CNN account for a kind of nadir in the history of modern civilization’s information delivery. The likes of Twitter, NYTimes.com, and Vice News (sure, I'm partial, but serious) will keep you more informed and entertained than all of the above, with video, if that’s what you'd feel like you’d be missing. TMZ has more juicy celebrity gossip than anything on TV, Buzzfeed does VH1-style nostalgia trips in the appropriate amount of time (30 seconds versus 30 minutes), and obviously, anyone who watches music videos does so on YouTube. 
 
 And I'm not worried that the death of cable TV will deprive of us of future Mad Men. We've already seen that the likes of Netflix and Amazon are more than willing to pay for thoughtful, elaborate productions; Transparent is the best show I've seen this fall, and everyone seems to love House of Cards and Orange is the New Black. The shows themselves are still better than ever, hence the success of Walking Dead—which, by the way, counted plenty of internet users among its record-breaking viewership—and there's indisputably a market for them. Now, plenty of niche shows may fall by the wayside without the help of subsidies from the big packages—but ultimately, I think that means less crappy TV and more time-wasting on the internet. 
 
 I'm planning on returning to internet-only TV. More and more people are following suit—the number of households without satellite or cable TV has grown 44 percent over the last four years. That oft-uttered phrase "Oh, I don’t have a TV" is no longer an affected hipsterism but a practical choice. 
 
 With HBO available online, the two things now keeping cable alive are the all-powerful ESPN (viewers still need cable to access its app, so it is now the major pull for enticing subscribers) and the inertia inherent to any long-accepted system. People used to cable are going to keep paying the bills. Ultimately, it will be cohort replacement that drives the final nail into cable's coffin—subscribers will simply eventually die off. 
 
 This doesn't mean that the internet has triumphed and won us a bullshit-free delivery system for our favorite shows. Cable companies have positioned themselves excellently to cope with this shift, by becoming our chief internet service providers as well, which means they'll still control the delivery mechanisms that make the shows viewable, and will no doubt find ways to increase profits over their streaming. 
 
 This is yet another reminder of the importance of preserving net neutrality. It's not hard to imagine a future where a newly merged Comcast-Time Warner offers users "high-speed delivery groups" of shows, ensuring high quality streaming for HBO GO, MLB.tv, or whatever else, for scaling fees. The power to deliver your favorite shows still lies in the hands of massive corporate conglomerates, in other words—but the days of pointless, overstuffed cable packages are drawing to a close.
– HBO's announcement that it will launch some of type of stand-alone streaming service next year means that "cable companies should be very, very afraid," writes Issie Lapowsky at Wired. It's a sentiment widely shared out there, with Brian Merchant at Vice chiming in, "From where I'm sitting, it’s the death knell for traditional cable television." After all, people who hate the expensive bundles offered by cable companies will be able to cut the cord and still get high-quality shows. Other entities such as the NFL, Comedy Central, AMC, and, now, CBS, offer similar options, and HBO's entry means "there's almost no conceivable reason you'd need a cable subscription," writes Merchant. People finally will be able to pick and choose what they will pay to watch. Skeptics say those most likely to sign up for the HBO service are probably young, tech-savvy adults who already skip cable, and thus the move won't lead to a significant jump in cord-cutters, writes Derek Thompson at the Atlantic. But even if it simply curbs cable's growth by preventing new sign-ups, "that's bad enough," he writes. The cable industry may still be "ridiculously profitable" but the "empire is shrinking" as subscriptions stagnate. "Bundling has worked," he writes. "Now it's ending. Somebody has to lose this game." Of course, cable companies also are in the business of providing Internet service, so expect them to try to boost profits on that front. In fact, at Forbes, Howard Homonoff thinks the biggest loser in all this isn't the cable industry—he figures most people will stick with cable for the foreseeable future—but Amazon, which recently signed a content deal with HBO for its Prime service.