FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE CONTACT: Corporate Communications 214/854-3190   BLOCKBUSTER® WEBSITE RECEIVES "BEST EVENT-RELATED WEBSITE" AWARD AT SOUTH BY SOUTHWEST FESTIVAL   DALLAS, April 14, 1998 - The Blockbuster website was honored at the recent South by Southwest Festival in Austin receiving the "Best Event-Related Website" award. The award, presented at the first annual South By Southwest Website Competition, honored Blockbuster's special website created to build excitement and awareness around the Fourth Annual Blockbuster Entertainment AwardsÆ held March 10 in Los Angeles. The site, www.blockbuster.com/awards/index.html, featured an array of special sections with video and music clips of the dozens of nominees, plus trivia and on-line voting. "One section, named "Fandemonium," linked favorite music and video fan sites like the "Mariah Carey is a Goddess" site at www.mariahc.com and "The Unofficial Leonardo DeCaprio Website" at www.dicaprio.com, to the Blockbuster page. The "Gameboard" section asked site visitors to guess the names of popular songs from 30-second excerpts from five popular songs. Another feature asked visitors to guess the names of popular videos from snap shots of the film. After the award show the site has continued to feature post-party coverage with celebrity interviews with today's hottest actors, actresses and musical acts from the award show in both video clips and pictures, plus the popular "Who's With Who," "Overheard Backstage," "Clothes Caption" (best dressed) and other celebrity gossip. The site will be up through the end of April with information about the Award winners. The Blockbuster Entertainment Awards, the largest publicly voted awards show, allows fans to vote for their favorite movie and music entertainers through in-store and on-line voting. While the majority of the 15 million votes were cast in Blockbuster Video and Blockbuster Music stores, there were several categories for which fans could only vote through the web site, including "Favorite Single," "Favorite Song from a Movie" and "Favorite Male -- Pop." More than 29,000 qualified votes were cast on-line. This was the first year that the South by Southwest Festival featured a website competition. The festival brings together thousands of musicians and record company executives in Austin each year in a city-wide sampling of music, film and on-line entertainment. Blockbuster Entertainment operates approximately 6,000 Blockbuster Video and 400 Blockbuster Music neighborhood entertainment stores in the United States, its territories and 25 other countries and may be accessed internationally at www. blockbuster.com. Blockbuster is a unit of Viacom Inc., one of the world's largest entertainment and publishing companies and a leading force in nearly every segment of the international media marketplace. ### |  Current Releases   |  Archives   | BLOCKBUSTER name, design and related marks are trademarks of Blockbuster Entertainment Inc. © 1998 Blockbuster Entertainment Inc. All rights reserved.