HBO’s executive leadership seems locked on keeping access to the premium cable network exclusive to cable and satellite TV subscribers, the same isn’t necessarily true for its HBO Go streaming service.

At the Game of Thrones season three premiere event earlier this week, the channel’s chief exec Richard Plepler opened up about the possibility of selling standalone access to HBO Go as part of a bundled broadband Internet subscription plan. Plepler suggested that bundling Internet service with premium streaming video services could be part of a new evolution for how content is packaged, but didn’t offer any kind of hard time frame of when it could happen, reports Reuters.

“We would have to make the math work,” Plepler told Reuters.

And I think I speak for a whole slew of people when I say, HBO needs to get cracking on that math ASAP.

HBO Go’s streaming app provides on-demand access to hundreds of notable movies as well as a complete library of all HBO original programming, including The Sopranos, True Blood, Newsroom, and Game of Thrones. And since HBO Go is currently a complimentary service to the cable channel, you’ll need to spend about $25 to $40 on top of a regular monthly cable or satellite TV subscription bill.

Yet, if HBO Go did become something that customers could add on to their Internet bundle, Plepler indicated that it could drop the price of the streaming service to an estimated $10 to $15 per month. That means people who only wanted Internet and HBO shows would spend around $65 per month instead of the over $150 in monthly subscriptions as a result of having a full cable TV service within a bundle of services.

Depending on who you talk to and which reports you read, cable TV subscriptions are being seen as unnecessary expenses that can’t compete with low-cost streaming services like Netflix and Hulu Plus, each of which cost $8 per month for a large library of video content. Over the next few years, this could translate into drastically lower cable TV customer — and in turn cut into the lucrative revenue stream that HBO currently gets by keeping the channel paired with cable subscriptions. And when you look at it that way, pairing HBO Go with broadband Internet actually makes a lot of sense for everyone except the cable companies.

Image via HBO

IAC-backed television service Aereo recently announced that it’s reached a deal to bring the Bloomberg TV cable network to its lineup of available channels, according to a Wall Street Journal report.

Aereo lets New York City residents watch free, locally broadcast HDTV channels (from local affiliate stations for ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox, CW, and others) on smartphones, tablets, and desktop computers. Aereo uses a tiny HD antenna the size of a dime to pick up the broadcast signal for each of its users, which makes it legal in the eyes of the law — much to the outrage of major entertainment companies. There’s also a DVR in the mix that lets users record up to 40 hours of content that can be streamed later.

Aereo’s deal with Bloomberg is significant because it’s the first cable channel to come to the service. Also, if more cable channels — such as those owned by Viacom like Comedy Central, MTV, and Spike –  sign deals to appear on Aereo, it could represent a new pay TV business model that costs consumers less money than cable and satellite TV while offering nearly all the same perks.

The average cable or satellite television subscriber pays over $100 per month, an amount that’s estimated to double by 2020. The bulk of those subscription fees are due to the forced inclusion of live sports programming that some people don’t even watch.

By contrast, Aereo has a flexible pricing structure that includes a $1 daily pass, $8 and $12 monthly passes, and an $80 annual plan. Those prices may rise as Aereo adds more cable channels to its lineup, but it’ll still be far less money than what most people are paying to their TV service provider right now. If Aereo did begin offering more live sports channels like the cable TV providers (something it hasn’t yet discussed), it could easily do so by offering a separate programming package for more money.

And although I doubt Aereo will ever offer channels in an à la carte pricing model (where you pick only the individual channels you want to pay for), the company does have plenty of potential to offer better programming packages than what’s offered by the likes of Comcast, DirecTV, Time Warner Cable, and AT&T Uverse.

Aereo’s Bloomberg TV deal may be a huge win for the service, but it still has some important legal hurdles to jump before it can truly become successful. Media company’s like News Corp./Fox, CBS, Walt Disney/ABC, and Comcast/NBCUniversal are currently suing Aereo, saying its use of  local HDTV broadcast signals (which provide free access to many TV channels if you have an HD antenna on your television set) is unfair and illegal. So far, both federal courts and groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation aren’t buying that argument, but a final ruling is expected in 2013.