So a month or two ago I found myself desperately needing to catch up on HBO’s new hit show, Game of Thrones. I started late, and wanted to get through the season without totally monopolizing the living room television. The competition for that screen can get pretty fierce, as it’s the only TV in the house with a cable box. In searching around the web for a solution, I stumbled across HBO Go, a relatively new streaming service that had launched completely under my radar.

I clicked, and signed in with my Comcast Xfinity account (they have a pretty fantastic instant selection going these days as well). It was as though the pearly gates of what internet media streaming could be. I couldn’t believe the marvels and wonders. High definition content! No ads! Best of all: every show HBO has ever created, and all of their current movie and documentary releases. For years, I have put off finally watching The Wire and The Sopranos because the most viable legal method, one of exchanging Netflix disc after Netflix disc, seemed like a horrible solution for seasons upon seasons of episodes. Now, it’s all at my fingertips, from the pilot to the finale. If you have been wanting to watch any of these shows, this is the time and place. And now that HBO Go is offered on the iPad and other tablets and smart phones, all of this content is even more accessible.

Now, it’s not perfect. The functionality of the site is a little strange and poorly organized. It’s hard to add whole seasons or series to your queue, and hard to figure out where your place is if you start and stop often (compared to Netflix’s streaming, which shows you a little bar indicating how much of each episode you have watched, an excellent solution for trying to figure out which episode you were on.) However, HBO Go saves your place inside the episode, as long as you don’t experience an error which reloads the page and starts you back at the beginning of the episode (which has happened to me many times). One of the more annoying aspects is the challenge of any streaming video these days: frame rate slowdowns. In an effort to pump higher and higher definition video through the internet tubes, often frame rate is sacrificed. I wish that all streaming services had an option similar to YouTube’s, a wide variety of resolution options so that your show doesn’t stop and start five times during an episode to recalibrate the quality because someone else in the house decided to start doing something bandwidth intensive.

But despite these hiccups, I still feel like HBO Go is another technological bellwether. Unfortunately, HBO is still so in bed with cable companies that HBO Go is only available to you if you already subscribe to HBO through your cable company, and even then it is only available through certain subscribers in certain markets, and not available at all outside the U.S. even if you already subscribe. However, I dream of a day when HBO is less shackled by yesterday’s limitations. What sense is there in paying over $100 a month when you don’t use 95% of the channels available to you? Ala carte options should, and will, become the new normal. Wouldn’t you pay $10-20/month for access to HBO’s entire library? I certainly would.

HBO Go is what streaming content should be: high quality, ad free, and comprehensive. And it’s what it will be, one day. But don’t expect the cable companies to go down without a fight.