TANDBERG Television's new RX8320 ATSC Broadcast Receiver is the recipient of a 2008 STAR Award presented by the editorial staff of TV Technology magazine at the NAB2008 convention.

The STAR Award is designed to celebrate and showcase the outstanding technological innovations available to the broadcast industry. A panel of judges consisting of TV Technology editors and columnists reviewed a variety of products, examined the technical applications and their overall contribution to the industry, and then submitted their award nominees.

As local terrestrial broadcasters in the US begin to phase out their analog broadcasts, the cable, telco and satellite operators who receive these local channels as content feeds need to deal with the transition to an all-digital ATSC environment. TANDBERG Television's RX8320 ATSC Broadcast Receiver with 8-VSB input is specifically designed to enable a simple, reliable solution to the ATSC broadcast transition for these operators.

The RX8320 provides both ASI and 8-VSB inputs for reception of broadcast services over terrestrial or fiber links with automatic redundancy switchover between the inputs. A transport stream output provides a pass-through capability so that operators can carry the digital signals all the way to a subscriber’s home. To support analog TV delivery, the RX8320 also provides MPEG-2 video decode and Dolby Digital audio decode capabilities, which includes 5.1 multi-channel to stereo down-mixing to allow an easy interface into the existing infrastructure. Any HDTV digital TV service can be down-converted for analog SD delivery.

To enable high definition 16:9 originated content to be rendered correctly on SD 4:3 displays the RX8320 provides automatic picture aspect ratio conversion based on active format description and bar data signaling present on the incoming digital TV service. Legal and regulatory requirements are also fulfilled by the RX8320 for the transition of ATSC broadcast services into analog TV delivery, with the extraction, translation and insertion of closed captions, Nielsen data, TV Guide data, and V-Chip program rating information into the analog video outputs.