Perhaps this technical post from AT&T labs (http://bit.ly/zFyXTw http://bit.ly/zFyXTw) discussing their work with Pandora to optimize power & bandwidth consumpt

Perhaps this technical post from AT&T labs (http://bit.ly/zFyXTw http://bit.ly/zFyXTw) discussing their work with Pandora to optimize power & bandwidth consumption might shed some light on AT&T's thinking. It might be a win-win for AT&T to partner with such app producers, optimize their network utilization in exchange for some end user subsidy -- extending the subsidy carriers give to device manufactures to the app developers, essentially?