HBO today announced that it will offer a standalone streaming service in 2015.

Richard Plepler, chairman and CEO of HBO, made the announcement at a Time Warner Inc. investor meeting today. Broadband-only homes are "a large and growing opportunity that should no longer be left untapped," he said. "It is time to remove all barriers to those who want HBO."

"So, in 2015, we will launch a standalone, over-the-top, HBO service in the United States. We will work with our current partners. And, we will explore models with new partners. All in, there are 80 million homes that do not have HBO and we will use all means at our disposal to go after them."

HBO is currently only available to those who also have a pay-TV package. Time Warner Cable subscribers, for example, can add HBO for about $15 extra per month.

Those who do not want or cannot afford cable, however, have long pushed HBO to offer an online-only service. The network has a number of extremely popular shows - from Game of Thrones to True Detective - to which many do not have access, prompting them to pirate the content or try in vain to avoid spoilers on the Web until the DVD release.

HBO has an online-viewing option, HBO GO, but it's only available to those with an HBO subscription via their TV providers. Still, HBO has no limits on concurrent viewers, like Netflix does, so many people share their log-ins to catch new episodes of favorite shows. HBO's new standalone service will likely allow people to sign up for HBO GO without going through their pay TV provider.

HBO has held off on a standalone service because of its deals with cable and pay TV services. During a February 2013 appearance at the ATD: Dive Into Mobile conference, HBO's (now former) COO Eric Kessler said its cable partners provide HBO with invaluable marketing and infrastructure support.

"It's really about economics," Kessler said at the time. There are approximately 101 million pay TV households in the U.S., and less than a third of those households are HBO subscribers, which Kessler said was a "tremendous opportunity" for growth.

The typical HBO customer, meanwhile, is a heavy TV watcher, and "we are targeting the people who are most likely to buy our product." He acknowledged that there is a group of people who "unquestionably" who would pay a monthly fee for HBO GO, like Netflix. But "if you go beyond the anecdotes ... the economics today are not compelling."

That's apparently no longer the case.

HBO gave us a taste of a standalone service in 2012, when it launched HBO Nordic in Sweden, Norway, Finland, and Denmark.

The company has also shied away from licensing its content to streaming services like Netflix. It recently provided content to Amazon Prime, but only older shows, suggesting that it might one day want to launch a streaming service of its own.