Multimedia Research Group unveiled its new IPTV Market Leaders Report, ranking IPTV Vendors in twenty-four geographic sectors. Four Vendors have maintained their global product leadership in six product areas, including Alcatel-Lucent in Access; Motorola in Video Headends, and Set-top Boxes; Microsoft in Video-on-Demand and Middleware; and Verimatrix in Content Protection/DRM. Over 900 IPTV Operators are included, many in the start-up phase.

MRG, Inc. also unveiled its new RankTracker system that allows semi-annual rank monitoring for over 100 IPTV Vendors across 40 million active subscribers, and displays how far each Vendor has moved up or down in each product segment. "RankTracker allows Vendors to easily track their own regional and global rankings every six months," said Jose Alvear, Senior IPTV Analyst at MRG, Inc. "For example, Alcatel-Lucent not only leads in Access, but can also track its new gains in global ranks in VOD and Middleware."

Additionally, RankTracker spotlights Set-top Box and Middleware Vendors by the number of Operator customers they have in each of the 5 different customer "Tiers" based on number of subscribers. ("Tier-1" customers have over 1 million IPTV subscribers, and Tier-5's have under 50,000.) "With Tiered breakdowns, you get much better accuracy on which Vendors are working with smaller Service Providers, who often have different needs than large Telcos," said Alvear. "One of the most interesting findings is that some top smaller Vendors may be ranked low globally, but may actually have hundreds of smaller customers which beats even some of the large global IPTV Vendors."

Therefore midsize Vendors like Amino, Entone, Espial, Minerva and others have higher rankings for their broad customer bases among smaller Operators, while larger Vendors like Microsoft and Motorola have shown growing success in penetrating Tiers 2-5. "This shows that the market still has room for growth, but also that the market is maturing and getting ready for something disruptive like 'OTT streaming' and 'Social TV,'" states Alvear.

More details are available at www.mrgco.com/iptv/mlr0511.html.