It seems like just yesterday when HBO was (finally) announcing its brand-new, standalone streaming service—celebrated by Game of Thrones fans throwing their hands up in the air and immediately calling Comcast (or whomever) to cancel their not-used-very-much cable service.

If you're a traditionalist who plans to keep to the ol' routine—a cable TV subscription and a premium add-on like HBO—and you're a big Microsoft gamer, then you'll be interested to know that HBO Go is currently being tested on the Xbox One. We don't have a lot of information beyond that, save for few pictures of a beta version of said app that were posted to the Reddit community r/xboxone.

As you might expect, the pictures have since been removed—one can only imagine that Microsoft likely wasn't too thrilled about their leaking out.

On the plus side, the existence of a beta for an HBO Go app does lead to speculation that said app might soon be ready for release. As WP Central notes, the exact same situation happened when the Xbox One app Plex was being beta tested. Screens leaked out and officially confirmed the app's existence, then bam—Plex hit the Xbox Marketplace a few weeks later.

If that timetable holds true for the HBO Go app, then fans of the premium channel shouldn't have very long to wait at all before they'll be able to stream their favorite HBO shows directly to their gaming consoles. Of course, one could also just use Microsoft's built-in TV browsing functionality (OneGuide) to watch HBO through the Xbox One anyway. We digress.

As for HBO's recently announced streaming service—which cable providers are undoubtedly less than thrilled with no matter how much HBO promises to work with its current partners to create the new service—the standalone HBO functionality will arrive at some point in 2015. There's no indication as to what the pricing might be, which is the biggest unknown at this point.

Or, to phrase it differently, how much would people be willing to pay for just HBO? Typically, HBO costs around $15 or so as an add-on to one's cable package. However, HBO would have to deal with a lot more infrastructure issues— and possibly figure out new contracts with the cable providers—in order to launch its own standalone service. Just how much of this might be passed down to potential purchasers is anyone's guess right now.