Dr. Gisle Bjøntegaard is selected as recipient of the prize for significant contributions in two areas, antenna development and video coding.

Comments related to the four criteria considered by the jury:

1 Quality

Dr. Bjøntegaard has performed excellent scientific work, which is well demonstrated by the impact it has had on the video coding standards. Beyond that he has developed solutions showing better quality than what has been included in the standards. One example is that he was a winner of the contest which was arranged by ISO at the beginning of the MPEG2 work, although other solutions were chosen based on agreement between some of the large partners.

2 Documented effect
Antennas designed on the solution developed by Bjøntegaard have now been manufactured in large quantities. In the video area on should bear in mind that still by the end of the 1980s the common idea about video compression was that PAL quality would require about 35 Mbps and HDTV would require a rate of 150 Mbps. We are now about to have digital TV distribution with at least PAL quality based on MPEG2 at 2-4 Mbps, which many fold extends the service capacity of satellites. Video telephony and video conferencing are operational services in many countries, and are basis for applications like tele-medicine and distant education.

3 Novelty and future potential for the development of the information society
It is reason to believe that we still have not seen the full utilisation of video in both retrieval and communication services. Pure video telephony and video conferencing are not wide spread yet, but with the extensive growth of the new "information networks", in the first place Internet but also ISDN, and with the proliferation of multi-media PC's at low cost it is judged that we may have a fast growth in applications that include video as one component. When it concerns TV distribution the MPEG standard will result in both a far greater offer of traditional channels and interactive services.

4 Promotion of results
The results of Dr. Bjøntegaards work has in the first place been promoted through successful input to the main standards on video compression and in both areas resulted in . It has also resulted in an industrial products.

Additional winners 1997/p>