Video Channel Companion

This month, we'll explore the companion web site of one of the up-and-coming cable channels bringing Country Music videos to U.S. audiences. Great American Country was launched on December 31, 1995. It competes with Country Music Television (CMT), owned by Gaylord Entertainment, who in turn, is owned by CBS. It is not my intent to get into how good the cable station is or compare it to CMT. This article will only explore GAC's web site, CountryStars.Com.

CountryStars.Com Is the companion to Great American Country. The cable station provides 24-hour-per-day viewing of Country Music videos. Owned by Jones International Networks, the station is part of a family of Country Music programs including nearly 450 radio stations that broadcast three different country music formats and three popular radio shows: "The Crook & Chase Country Countdown" (there's a link to their Top 40 listing), "Nashville Nights," and "Country's Most Wanted."

The web site is organized at two different levels. The main page contains links to the various topical aspects covered. We'll explore each of these below. Also on the front page are links to the various shows presented by the cable network. You can also get to each of these pages through links contained on the various topical pages. Travelling from section to section is easily accomplished by the topical links being repeated at the bottom of each page.

The Country Artists section contains an impressive list of country artists with links to bio information, including facts and statistics about each artist. Some artists have video clips available (these are noted by a videocassette graphic on the artist-list page). Most, however were too short in duration to be worth viewing. In fact, the longest one I found lasted 24 seconds. Each of the video clips were in AVI format, which made for easy playback or saving on your hard-drive. One nice feature was the ability to travel sequentially from artist to artist using "next" and "previous" links. The Artist section also contained A photo album of 100 pictures suitable for saving on your hard drive and making into Windows Wallpaper. Each picture can be accessed through a thumbnail on one of five pages. There is also fan club addresses and concert information provided by a link to Country Weekly Online.

The Program Schedule section provides a weekly schedule of when the special programs can be seen. Each entry on the schedule links to a brief description of the show. Briefly, "Fast Forward" previews newly released videos, listing those being shown during the week; "Top 15 Countdown" shows the top videos of the week as voted by visitors to the site, listing the top 15 for the current week and a link to the voting page; "Edge Of Country" shows videos of Traditional, Americana, Bluegrass and Country Rock styles; "Behind The Scenes" features interviews with the artists; and "Inside Country" features in depth interviews with reviews, videos and concert footage mixed in. The Voting page allows readers to vote for five videos from among 50 suggested videos currently being screened or by write-in. This is where video clips would be helpful.

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