Despite pioneering in the IPTV field, latter day Qwest wasn't much on the idea of getting into the TV business, repeatedly insisting they supported the idea of an "over the top" solution. Granted that was partially because Qwest spent the last few years shopping itself around, and made debt reduction its first priority. In contrast, new Qwest owner CenturyLink offers an IPTV service dubbed Prism, but only in select markets. Initially the telco balked when asked about when and if they'd expand these services, but now they're offering new detail on just who'll be getting upgrades -- and it won't be many of you.

"We pass about a million homes today with our IPTV service and expect to provide service to at least one Qwest market in 2012 and potentially two markets," said Stewart Ewing, EVP and CFO of CenturyLink. Overall however their total number of IPTV customers sits at roughly 50,000.

Speaking at the recent Citi Entertainment, Media and Telecommunications Conference, CenturyLink, Ewing insisted that once the carrier gets at least 20 Mbps service deployed they feel they're "well positioned" to participate if over the top streaming video services like Netflix "eventually takes some of the traditional TV market."

The problem for most of these second and third shelf telcos is they're losing customers quickly to cable operators, who are offering true triple (and soon quadruple) play services in addition to faster speeds. While the company passes 5.4 million homes with FTTN, the majority of their customers (and those acquired by Embarq and Qwest) are on older DSL. 20% of CenturyLink's customers can get 20 Mbps or higher, half can get 10 Mbps or higher, and two-thirds can get 6 Mbps or higher.

That leaves a lot of customers of slower speeds, and while the company insists they'll slowly get around to upgrading these customers -- it's not clear if they'll be quick enough to prevent a significant erosion to cable competitors (and their new friend Verizon).