For the Video Headends we have measured market position using estimates of the number of IPTV channels that are to be provided using the 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 each company's market position. This methodology gives a good measure of the relative position of each company as well as the prospects for future growth.

This report includes a ranking of the leading companies in each product category along with the number of subscribers or channels that each company's products support today. We have extended this approach by listing the top five rankings globally and within each region.

In addition, we rate the growth prospects for each company based on the number of large IPTV service deployments the company is participating in. We have included tables that show the number of significant deployments that each company is included globally and within each region.

A significant deployment is one that has been announced and is expected to grow by at least 70,000 subscribers in 2007 or 2008.

This report includes the Asian, European, North American, and Rest of the World (ROW) regions.

This report is part of the IPTV Tracking Service published by the Multimedia Research Group, Inc.

Executive Summary

This report analyzes which companies have taken leadership positions in each market segment:

-Access systems
-Video Headend systems
-Video-On-Demand systems
-Set-top Boxes
-Middleware
-Digital Rights Management and Content Protection

The market leaders for each of these markets are defined for each of the following regions:

-Global
-Asia
-Europe
-North America
-Rest of the World (ROW)

The ratings in this Market Leader Report are based on a database of IPTV service providers that we have gathered. The breakdown of this database is shown in Table 1-1. There are 576 IPTV service providers in this database with 309 of them in North America. This is up from 474 service providers since our September 2006 IPTV Market Leader Report, an increase of more than 100 service providers in the last six months.