HBO has given people who listen forlornly to their friends talking about new episodes of Girls or Boardwalk Empire the barest of hopeful tidbits to snack on: HBO Go “maybe,” “could” be bundled as a service from broadband providers, in place of or addition to cable provider partnerships. Reuters reports that HBO has yet to work out the numbers, but to us the company sounds about 40 percent sure that it’s certain that this could, indeed, happen.

HBO shows are highly inaccessible given the digital age we live in. Game of Thrones in particular suffers from a high rate of piracy, which some indignant viewers and lookers-on attribute to the lack of availability of HBO’s programs. HBO does not participate in services like iTunes Season Pass or Hulu, and unless one subscribes to a full cable service package and pays an extra fee for HBO’s channels, the only other legitimate avenue to an HBO show is waiting for it to be released on DVD. HBO Go is the service’s digital extension that makes shows available on tablets, smartphones, and the Web, but only to cable subscribers.

But HBO chief executive Richard Plepler shined a laser pointer’s worth of light on the network's future today: “Maybe HBO Go, with our broadband partners, could evolve,” Plepler told Reuters. “We have to make the math work.”

With such a move, HBO could risk stepping on the toes of the cable providers who pay heavy subscription fees for the exclusivity HBO commits to. But then, cable providers and broadband providers are often two arms on the same body (Comcast, Time Warner). If HBO could transfer its subscription fees to broadband bills rather than cable ones, there could be a situation amenable to all parties.