Convolutional turbo codes are very flexible codes, easily adaptable to a large range of data block sizes and coding rates. This is the main reason for their being adopted in the DVB standard for Return Channel via Satellite (DVB-RCS). The paper presents the turbo coding/decoding scheme specified in this standard, for twelve block sizes and seven coding rates. Simulation results show the performance of the coding scheme chosen, in particular for the transmission of ATM cells and MPEG transport stream packets. The company TurboConcept has developed a hardware prototype for the double purpose of very low error rate performance measurement and demonstrates the hardware feasibility of this new turbo code. Some hardware measurement results are also discussed.