Market opportunity. It's the first figure cited in every hopeful business case, the apparition that pops the eyes and the banquet that waters the mouth of every entrepreneur. It's the justification for every risk and driver of all competition. Thus, this enticing headline from Yankee Group last week: the triple-play market will be worth $145.3 billion by 2009. That's big. Great news. Unfortunately, Yankee says market leaders will be pretty much decided by then.

If that's the case, the big carriers might as well fold up their tents and go home. They'll still need the next two years to get their FTTx and IPTV acts together. By then, if Yankee is correct, 70 million customers will already be locked into service bundles they can't — or won't bother to — escape from. At the current pace, many of those customers will belong to cable providers. And those customers can only come from one place.

It's hard to play catch-up and it's not very profitable to give away one's services at bargain-basement prices — which is what carriers would have to do if they fall behind — in order to convince potential customers that it is worth the hassle of disrupting their lives by switching all their communication and entertainment services to another provider — particularly back to one they just left. The thing that's so enticing about this $145.3 billion market is not that it's all-new revenue — because it's not — but it's revenue that service providers could count on like they haven't been able to since 1984. It's revenue that would be secure in the sticky clutches of the bundle. Practically unchurnable.

Had the real estate market maintained its blistering pace, service providers could keep new housing developments in their back pockets as opportunities to gain or win back customers. But stagnation is the enemy there as it is in all businesses and those opportunities are less dependable. Carriers have done well to avoid stagnation lately and IPTV is an expression of that. Now they just need to get over that “slow as molasses” thing and they'll be fine.