HP announced that it has worked with Intel to open two Internet Protocol TV (IPTV) test centers to help carriers and broadband providers take advantage of the opportunities of the emerging technology.

The IPTV Centers of Excellence will help customers accelerate deployment of new revenue-producing IPTV services, as well as reduce the costs and risks associated with them. The centers also address the service providers' need for a "one-stop" facility where they can test and validate IPTV solutions and resolve problems before the solution is deployed for subscribers.

At the two facilities, located in Grenoble, France, and Richardson, Texas, HP and Intel have created state-of-the-art working environments where carriers and broadband providers can develop and model the infrastructure they need to deliver a successful IPTV service. The facilities allow for performance and scalability evaluation, characterization, sizing, full proof-of-concept testing, and integration of IPTV solutions into the network and the operational and business support systems.

"Intel and HP have created a world-class IPTV resource that will deliver very real operational and business value for service providers," said Peggy Dau, worldwide director, broadband and media solutions, Communications, Media and Entertainment, HP. "Our close cooperation with Intel has been key to HP's overall effort to make IPTV services more attractive for both operators and consumers."

At the centers, service providers will use HP ProLiant servers and server blades with the recently announced Dual-Core Intel® Xeon™ processor series, as well as HP Integrity servers with Intel® Itanium® 2 processors. They will have access to HP professional services, HP service management solutions for IPTV, and HP content management and distribution expertise. The centers also will include Intel technologies such as virtualization, active management and input/output acceleration.

The new centers broaden the already extensive cooperation between HP and Intel in the converging telecom, broadband and media markets. In 2002, the two companies established their first competence center dedicated to these industries.

"This center is the result of a longstanding collaboration with HP to bring service providers a testing facility that helps them bring their solutions to market faster," said Ralph Corey, director, communications and media solutions, Customer Solutions Group, Intel. "Through the use of the latest technology from Intel and HP, service providers are able to test their solutions in advance of bringing them to market, thereby improving their overall operational efficiency for new IPTV deployments."

IPTV Centers of Excellence focus on six solutions "stacks"
HP and Intel have defined six areas where they will help carriers and broadband providers enhance their IPTV offerings:

• Infrastructure — Deploy an end-to-end IPTV environment, including head-end for content import and ingest, video servers, IPTV middleware, content protection, and digital home environment. Define and characterize baseline architecture for IPTV ecosystems for centralized and distributed environments, including guidelines for hardware configurations and integration points.
• Video server reference architecture — Optimize video streaming capability with minimal server resources, based on network capacity and topology, streaming capacity and subscriber density, and storage of movie catalog and consumption patterns.
• IT service management — Define standard management processes for handling incidents, problems, changes and configurations, and overall service levels.
• Service assurance — Define requirements for comprehensive quality of service and management of distributed IPTV applications. Document guidelines for implementation of HP service assurance tools in IPTV environment.
• Content distribution — Define, test and document managed content delivery network overlay to the underlying, physical telecom network.
• Service provisioning — Prepare content for distribution by IPTV service. Define head-end workflow for content import, channel line-up, and catalog management.

The IPTV Centers of Excellence are operating and available for use by carriers and broadband providers. More information is available at www.hp.com/go/iptv.