Bandwidth caps and Netflix - Lets face reality...

GigaOm reports on EyeIO, which provides video encoding technology that promises to save anywhere from 20% to 50% on bandwidth used.  From the article

Standard-definition Netflix streams can consume up to 2.2 Mbps of bandwidth. Netflix’s 720p HD videos come in at roughly 3.8 Mbps,  and 1080p videos go up to 4.8 Mbps. EyeIO CEO Rodolfo Vargas told me during a phone conversation Tuesday that his company’s encoding technology can achieve better-looking results that most established encoders with 20 percent bandwidth savings, and that eyeIO can still deliver similar quality to other encoders with up to 50 percent bandwidth savings. Content in 720p could be streamed using 1.8 Mbps, he explained. The company does this by optimizing the encoding process, which means that the results are regular, albeit smaller H.264 files that can be played by end users without any need for additional plug-ins.

Sounds great, I'm all for it, lower bandwidth utilization is Good, Kumbaya, etc..  I think where the article falls down is when it says that this will help Netflix in its battle with ISPs.  I fear that this is, at best, a second order issue as far as bandwidth caps are concerned.
ISPs have been shouting about exploding bandwidth for years, making all sorts of analogies along the way (water pipes, fedex, etc.).  The problem is that that these analogies don't hold water, and virtually no-one actually believes that there is a real technological reason for bandwidth caps.  As Cringely puts it in a truly excellent rant

No matter what your ISP says, their backbone costs are inconsequential and to argue otherwise is probably a lie. [...] This isn’t about capping ISP losses, but are about increasing ISP profits.

The real reason for the caps is to prevent businesses from Netflix from eating into the ISPs other revenue streams (Comcast does have a content business that Netflix competes with, y'know?).   Think of the bandwidth cap as a kind of rent on any third-party content that flows through the inter-tubes.  The rentier wants to collect a certain amount of money - if the number of renters goes down, the rent will go up to keep the revenue the same.  Ergo, if the amount of bandwidth used by Netflix goes down, and it turns out that people don't run into bandwidth caps, then dollars to donuts the bandwidth cap will go down to 200GB, 150GB, or whatever, because of "unexpected costs", or whatever.

Back to my point - Netflix gains, at best, a second order benefit here, i.e., they can point out to Congress, the public, etc. that the ISPs aren't playing fair by reducing the bandwidth cap.  But direct effects?  nah, ain't going to happen...