ZTE recently announced that it has been rated as a global market leader in three major market segments by the IPTV (News - Alert) Global Market Leader Report. The market segments include IPTV middleware, video-on-demand (VOD), and set-top boxes (STB). The published report was a 2013 year-end edition, and was issued by the Multimedia Research Group. ZTE (News - Alert) is a global provider of telecommunications equipment, network solutions and mobile devices.

The objective of the report was to evaluate the global market performance of IPTV equipment and service providers based on the number of active users for each target product. 955 IPTV service providers, six key IPTV products, and content protection markets in eight regions across the world, were analyzed for the report. The six key IPTV products were, access systems, head-end, VOD, STB, middleware. The content protection markets in the eight target regions included North America, Latin America, Caribbean, Western Europe, Eastern Europe, Asia-Pacific and Middle East and Africa.

 In a release, Frank Fang, vice president, ZTE, said, "Since the emergence of IPTV ZTE has dedicated itself to R&D and market development in this field. The MRG MLR report is a key milestone highlighting ZTE as a global leader. With the advent of the LTE (News - Alert) era and fiber deployment, ZTE will continue to deliver IPTV, OTT, mobile video, and other innovative solutions and business models to help TV operators’ customers to enjoy video services anytime and anywhere.”

According to the report, ZTE’s middleware segment has surpassed Microsoft’s Mediaroom (now Ericsson (News - Alert)) with 22.7 percent market share. Microsoft had been a leader in this segment for the past five years. With 14 of the 15 VOD companies reporting over one million subscribers, the VOD segment has been deemed to be most competitive one. ZTE led the segment by achieving 20.6 percent global market share over former market leader Microsoft (News - Alert) with its 16.7 percent market share. The IPTV STB segment is considered to be the most aggressive segment with 27 vendors competing. ZTE has 22.9 percent of the market share.

ZTE offers custom-made products and services including broadband video solutions, over the top (OTT), hybrid TV, multi-screen, CDN, digital rights management, caching, wireless, access and bearer, VAS, terminals, and value-added services.