The television industry loves nothing more than a copycat, which is why CBS announced via press release the creation of its own streaming service, CBS All Access, on Thursday.

This is most decidedly a reaction to HBO announcing that it will allow people to purchase its popular HBO Go as a stand-alone subscription (much like Netflix) without having to buy a cable package. Is it finally here, the great cord-cutting utopia that everyone who hates paying $200 a month to their loathed cable company has been waiting for?

Well, not quite. First of all, the CBS All Access deal will charge users $5.99 a month to stream all of its current shows and a bunch of their old shows (including Cheers, The Good Wife and Twin Peaks, which means you better seize the opportunity to watch it on Netflix while it’s still available). Unlike HBO Go, which won’t be available to consumers until 2015, you can sign up for CBS All Access right this very second.

The problem is, there will be still be advertising on CBS All Access. The service will also be Nielsen-rated, because until networks can figure out how to make money off their shows other than advertising they need to count and monetise every one of those viewers.

Subscribers will be able to stream content from 14 CBS affiliates in major markets (with more to be added after this hasty announcement), but if you don’t watch it live you’ll have to wait until the next morning. Basically what CBS wants is for viewers to finally pay for what we already do for free: watching The Good Wife on their website when football runs over and our DVRs don’t record the whole thing. Speaking of which, that’s probably not going to be an option now that CBS has recognized this as a revenue stream. No one will buy the cow when they can stream the milk for free.

CBS’s The Good Wife. Photograph: Allstar/CBS/Sportsphoto Ltd

CBS’s move makes it clear why the networks took their case against Aereo, a paid service that would let viewers watch and record network shows online, all the way to the supreme court. Aereo was defeated and the networks were able to take their financial future into their own hands.

Are all the other networks going to follow CBS’s plan? Probably not. Fox, NBC, ABC and a venture capital firm own Hulu, which is why all of their programmes run on Hulu Plus rather than other streaming services. CBS currently licenses a huge chunk of their programming both past and present to Hulu, an arrangement you can expect to end when that contract is up. CBS also owns both the CW and Showtime, so those libraries could be added to CBS All Access to sweeten the deal (but pray to god they don’t mess up episodes of Homeland by jamming commercials in the middle of them).

As for Hulu and Netflix, there will probably be no big changes in their current strategy, at least in the immediate future. Amazon and Yahoo, home of critical hit Transparent and future home of the next season of Community, are still too small to respond to this current streaming mania. If there are going to be more entries it will probably come from the cable conglomerates like Turner, which could leverage TBS, TNT and especially Cartoon Network into streaming gold. Or what about a Scripps Networks subscription harnessing HGTV, Food Network, DIY Network, and others? It could be House Hunters all the time any time you want (which is basically all HGTV is anyway). ESPN could make a trillion dollars with sports, which is still the largest draw to television for both viewers and advertisers. That is truly the next big frontier.

What is more likely to happen is that the current players, especially Netflix and Hulu, are going to get a lot more competitive with the access they have to which content and when. Look for them to invest even more in exclusive original programming.

Hopefully the grand forces of capitalism will also mean a price war, which would be a boon for consumers. However, it looks like right now our cost-cutting utopia is going to feature signing up for a litany of services just to get close to what standard cable TV offers. Even if it becomes affordable, now that people are trying to make money off of this, there should be a major clampdown on both password sharing and legitimate avenues to watch shows online for free.

Emilia Clarke as Khaleesi in HBO’s Game of Thrones. Photograph: Rex/HBO/Everett

Sure it will be cheaper than a cable bill, but consumers will end up paying for HBO Go, Hulu, Netflix, CBS All Access and Amazon Prime while filling in the programming gaps by downloading individual episodes from iTunes. That is all going to add up and once services get savvy to people signing up for and cancelling services just to watch one show (like Game of Thrones, for instance) expect there to be monthly fees but longer-term contracts like how we pay for cellphone plans.

By 2015 we’re not going to be in the inevitable future where all TV shows (or what used to be known as TV shows) are available any time on demand, but we will be in a place that many people have hoped for, a place where it will be like having cable but choosing what channels you pay for rather than the blitz of a thousand-plus that we hardly know exist. This is what makes streaming services so attractive, especially at their current price point. They’re meant to attract people who don’t want to pay for cable in the first place. Maybe cord-cutting is a misnomer, maybe these people are the ones that are finally plugging in.

For people who still have cable and who don’t mind paying, there are still some things that need to happen before they will really be able to cut the cord entirely, including something like a DVR or a central hub to control and surface the content they want to watch and can capture live events like the Super Bowl and the Oscars, which aren’t nearly as fun to watch the next morning when you already know who won. Once the streaming field settles down and people know where they can find the shows they want, when they’ll be available, and how much they will cost, that’s when the real cord-cutting will begin in earnest.

The future is still fuzzy and most prognostications are only a bit more concrete than what you’d get from your friendly neighbourhood psychic. What is very clear is that there are a lot of changes on the horizon and that HBO’s announcement means they’ll be happening fast and furious. Having more options, which is what HBO and CBS are currently offering, is never bad for consumers. There is a revolution going on regarding how we consume our television content, the revolution is now and the revolution will be televised.