Here's what I'm thinking. The handheld device becomes your primary internet interaction device. So for business you plug it into the back of a laptop that does nothing more than serve as a keyboard and display.
For radio, there are apps for that now, world wide. For TV, most everything comes off the net and there's much over the air digitally. For movies, stream from Netflix.
That leaves sports and breaking news, some of which is over the air.
So the little hand held becomes the remote control, DVR and conduit for your large screen in home TV.
Good bye $100 per month cable bills.
The cost to build out the wireless carriers’ networks to accommodate the level of data consumption we’re talking about here will be considerable.
I’m not saying that it won’t happen - I’m just saying that you’re not going to stream the amount of bandwidth you use to watch TV over your phone for $30/month, which is what I’m paying for “unlimited” data on my Verizon Droid X right now.
If I want to tether this phone to a laptop, for example (and Verizon wouldn’t care if the laptop were, in reality, my iMac which is the size of a TV set), that would be an additional $30/month. So we’re now talking about getting rid of the DirecTV subscription (which is $77/mo) and doing just as you’re saying - streaming data over our terrestrial ‘net connection (which is $60/mo).
When it is all said and done, I don’t think the consumer will be saving gobs of money, only taking the IP connection with him/her on the go, that’s all.