HP has opened two IPTV test centers–one in Richardson, Texas, and the other in Grenoble, France. Though the centers are being run by HP, the company has been collaborating with Intel on IPTV technology, and the two worked together to set up the two facilities.

Service providers can use the IPTV Centers of Excellence 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.

The centers will have six focus areas: Infrastructure, video server reference architecture, IT service management, service assurance, content distribution, and service provisioning.

The centers are equipped with HP ProLiant servers and server blades, which are based on 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 will also include Intel technologies such as virtualization, active management and input/output acceleration.