Research and Markets has announced the addition of the "IPTV Market Leaders Report - Issue 2 2008" report to their offering.

Ranking

This IPTV Market Leaders Report identifies which IPTV systems and software companies are leading each of the six IPTV market segments: Access, Video Headend, Video-on-Demand, Middleware, Set-top Box, and Content Protection/Digital Rights Management. We have identified and are tracking over 80 companies for this report. This report includes a breakdown of the four regional markets, Asia, Europe, North America, and Rest of the World regions, as well as global leaders. Market position is measured using estimates and actual numbers of active IPTV subscribers that are using (or being supported by) each company’s products for all segments except Video Headends. For the Video Headend category, we measure market position using the reported number of IPTV channels provided using each company’s products. Since a Video Headend may support two thousand or two million subscribers, the number of channels is a much better measure of a company’s market position.

The total subscriber count also includes a small number of subscribers served by systems we have verified, but where the suppliers have not been identified. Using these totals for each regional segment, therefore, the top 5-10 companies are ranked. Subscriber counts are verified by triangulating reports from multiple vendors, public announcements and direct contact with IPTV Operators.

Overall, these methodologies give a good measure of each company’s relative position and ranking, as well as their future growth prospects.

Growth Prospects

The future growth prospects for each company is rated based on the number of large IPTV service deployments the company is participating in. We include tables that count each vendor’s significant deployments both globally and within each region. A significant deployment is one that has been announced and is expected to be one of the world’s top 25 systems by number of IPTV subscribers in 2011.

The Global IPTV Market Leaders Report — August 2008, tracks the top 100 IPTV vendors in 24 regional sub-segments based on the installed base of 6 video systems products in over 660 IPTV Operations. Continuing growth of orders are reflected by increased deployments of IPTV products in Europe, Asia, Rest of World, and even in North America.

The merger and acquisitions activity continues with news from Viaccess’ purchase of Orca and Espial’s acquisition of Kasenna, leaving ripples of change throughout the Middleware, VOD and Content Protection sectors. For the first time, Microsoft has moved upward to third position globally in Middleware, VOD and Content Protection, as other Middleware and VOD providers brace for further rolling swells from the software giant. Verimatrix again scores in the top 5 vendors in all 4 regions and as #1 globally in Content Protection, showing a significant consistency in all major markets in the world, and indicating how difficult this sector is to lead for more than 18 months.

In VOD, Thomson pulls to Number one globally for the first time, leaving SeaChange in second place. In STBs (set-top boxes), Motorola remains in the global lead while competitors Sagem, Cisco and Amino are showing the ability to close the gap in front of them.

“Some IPTV market segments are more volatile than others and will certainly see some changes in the future,” says Jose Alvear, MRG Analyst. “However, one thing is certain: the IPTV market is still going strong. Not only are subscriber numbers rising, but new Operators are still in the midst of deploying IPTV systems all around the world.”

Companies like Ericsson, Thomson, NEC, Nortel and Cisco are expected to create strong “turn-key” alliances with best of breed companies on a regional and local basis, to compete with the strong regional successes of companies like UTStarcom and ZTE. “Turn-key system strategies on a regional and even a local basis marks a new era in vendor strategies to develop stronger and more flexible local marketing as a means of helping IPTV Operators to control and accelerate trialing and early deployment stages,” says Gary Schultz, President, MRG, Inc.