Many carriers are doing away with their unlimited data plans, putting caps on everything. This has all but eliminated any chance of streaming video becoming popular among smartphone users and putting a damper any money being made by streaming video services on the mobile market.
According to GigaOm, providers like Verizon and AT&T have asked the popular Netflix service to start charging for bandwidth used by its members with their smartphone app service
They have tried to convince Netflix to make users pay for bandwidth used on their networks. An absolutely ridiculous proposition. No Smartphone user in their right mind would ever pay data overage charges to watch a streaming video of an unpopular or overplayed movie.
Realizing this, Netflix responded by allowing iPhone customers to turn of cellular access to Netflix and run the app completely on Wi-Fi. An easy solution for anyone who really wants to watch their favorite TV show/movies on a three inch screen at home. Anyone using Wi-Fi is most likely going to be using is at home, and if they have Netflix they probably have a television or a much larger computer screen to watch it on.
Granted, some unlimited plans still exist, and there are lots of people out there that were grandfathered into unlimited plans from AT&T and Verizon, but data caps are the current trend, and carriers are doing everything they can to get people to downgrade to capped data plans. Some operators even cut down on speed after a certain limit is reached, so even if you are not over your overage amount, the data stream will be slowed and you will not be able to view a video anyway..
So basically, they have done away with streaming video, because no one can really use it.
If anyone thought this money would go to providing more network capabilities in the future, allowing for more data to be transferred and unlimited plans to be offered, one might be inclined to go with idea of data caps. Right now it just seems like a ploy to get the most amount of money they can from smartphone users.