Witbe, a French provider of IPTV monitoring solutions and services, has indicated that it now provides test and measurement services to a number of new European tier-one telco customers, namely Spain's Telefónica and Germany's Deutsche Telekom.

Telefónica contracted Witbe to work with its R&D team in advance of a much larger, group-wide project covering its affiliates in Latin America, and the two teams are also cooperating to develop enhanced features for the Witbe robot such as the detection of lipsync and OCR.

In Spain, the company will assist with Telefónica's test and measurement operations, using Witbe robots to measure their broadcast and on-demand services in SD and HD, as well as users' quality of experience, including zapping time, video quality, audio quality, navigation time through interactive services, robustness of the set-top box and rebooting time.

"Scalability is the most pressing issue today," said a Witbe spokesperson.  "As the IPTV industry matures, more and more operators are gaining valuable industry know-how and best practice experience. Today, anyone can set-up an IPTV platform in a lab. But only a few can manage a platform that handles a million subs while ensuring good quality."

Deutsche Telekom meanwhile has reportedly contracted Witbe to deliver end-to-end monitoring of its broadcast and on-demand services, again in SD and HD, delivered over the Microsoft Mediaroom platform, with Witbe robots deployed throughout Germany to continuously reproduce and monitor customer behaviour.

Witbe already provides monitoring solutions and services to a number of European IPTV operators, including every French operator, Orange Spain, Sonaecom and Portugal Telecom.