A lot of countries also have ISPs that allow free data from particular sites. I'd be betting without a doubt that these would be severely pushed by companies to become a member of these..

I think Steam has proven that many will backpedal on their principles for the right price. I think steam/cloud gaming has the potential to screw the consumer badly from corporate interests, so watch it get heavily pushed/discounted until it becomes the mainstream format (could be a couple of years or a couple of decades, but I'm talking in ultimate terms)

I think that server farms/mass redundancy the way places like Google do would ensure downtime is kept to an absolute minimum. Shutting down services is when it will get fun in the courts (see: What the consumer owns vs what the consumer rents as service).

The technology is already here, the problem is its rollout. Until last September, my country was rolling out Fibre to the Home technology. That's on the backburner at the moment, but both corporate and consumer demand will force them to complete it properly.

pfff my bed is nintendo's next console will be a hybrid of home/portable console....

Steam is not cloud gaming................................

Steam is a service situated between physical copies and coud based computing. In other words, it's a progression towards cloud gaming.

It's just an example of consumers losing some rights in the name of heavy discounts.

They will probably replace cable boxes as well, when all cable channels are available via stream.

This is what you call generalizing at its finest!

Also OP is basically talking about phones, and says "systems like the 3DS". Looks like someone didn't read the OP and just looked at the OP's avatar.

Is it the future? Yes. Near future? No.

This would most definitely almost eliminate what's deemed "illegal cable", plus I can see "on demand" being pushed massively by consumers. The amount of BitTorrent piracy for TV shows I'd say proves it.

Cable companies in Australia aren't pushing for this for 2 reasons:

1. We have one dominant provider here, a monopoly if you will, owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation. Moving the country over to streaming media would open the doors to competition, as well as allow sports venues to host their own channels and streaming services. This is why Murdoch heavily pushed for the Abbott opposition to become government, in order to sabotage the greatest threat to Murdoch's monopoly here: the National Broadband Network.

2. Since it's a monopoly, Murdoch's company (Foxtel) forces channels on to consumers that they don't want (for instance, if you want the Comedy Channel, you need to buy about 20 other channels in the same package, the majority being absolute garbage). On-demand streaming will render 95% of these bullshit channels as financially unsustainable...

It's funny how corporate interests change if there's a monopoly involved. Usually it involves supression of new technologies.

Well, two scenarios:

- Without cloud gaming: mobile phones and handhelds will never reach consoles. A mobile SoC have to deal with a TDP of 12 W on tablets and less than that in smaller devices. A console can consume 200 W without much problem while a PC could even consume 1000 W or more. You can't do the same with much less power unless you use a much more advanced technology, so mobile SoCs are always some years behind in power. Nvidia is still trying to beat PS360 with their SoCs, they won't come close to PS4/One power in less than 7 or 8 years (and by then, PS5/Xbox whatever will be the hot new thing). 

Obs.: Before anyone says that Tegra K1 beats PS360, I'm still a bit sceptical. Nvidia promissed a lot of things on Tegra 3 (I have one) and underdelivered. They promissed PS360 quality on Tegra 4 and underdelivered. I actually believe Tegra K1 could be their last SoC.

- With cloud gaming: you won't need a mobile at all. Why you will need your phone for that? Your TV can to the job with just a paired joystick. I'm betting that we will see at least one more generation of dedicated consoles after PS4/One, then maybe we will go to cloud gaming. Anyway, looking at how things are now, we will have the same companies that manufactured consoles serving cloud gaming (MS already has cloud services, Sony have PS Now and Nintendo have some good 7 years to move or become obsolete).

If cloud becomes a reality, it won't kill consoles. It will kill all computing devices as we know them and replace by thin client versions. PS5 could be a cheap and weak device of the size of Vita TV paired with DS5 using a low power comsumption SoC and playing cloud games.

We said the same things back in 2011.