The bandwagon on behalf of "Mobile TV" is coming down your street, just in time for the holidays.

If you're a kid it's pretty exciting. But I've seen this parade before, many times. I can enjoy your pleasure, but that doesn't mean I'm not going to join "Santa" later at our favorite bar for a few pops and expect he'll make me pick up the tab.

The big truth is that it's now pretty trivial to put a TV tuner into a mobile phone. Yes, the days of Dick Tracy's wristwatch TV are really here. (Image from USA Today.)

Of course you remember what Tracy used the technology for? To see his boss while he was talking to him. I did the same thing at the 1964 World's Fair, where AT&T had a videophone demonstration. It was no big deal then, and it's no big deal now.

Entrepreneurs like Blake Krikorian of Sling Media, who is profiled in the Business Week story above, think you'll use the capability to watch their streams. Most people watch brief snippets of TV anyway, not whole shows, he says. No time. So offer them such streams for the moments where they're standing in line at the Airport, or waiting for a meeting to start, and they will pay through the nose for them.

Maybe. But maybe not.

As with a lot of the hype I've seen in the past decade -- whether on the Internet or on mobile platforms -- it's all about what we did, not what we're going to do.

The assumptions of what we will do with technology never match the hype. They are always based on what we did with older technology.

When I got into Internet commerce full-time, back in 1994, publishers all thought they could simply "repurpose" their content and make more from it. It's publishing, they said. Or it's broadcasting. (Mark Cuban made a fortune off that assumption, but what really became of it?)

It wasn't any of that. It's gaming, it's search, it's blogs, and (most of all) it's research. The Internet is a giant distillery, boiling the mash of knowledge and giving you (you hope) its essence.

What will we do with mobile technology? My guess (and it's just a guess) is we'll communicate with it. It's about two-way services, not one-way services.

Next to the real potential of mobile broadband, TV is a a pimple, a wart. It's going to be there, but it's not going to be the story.

My advice? Step back. And let the users decide.