The following text is reprinted unaltered from my YouTube channel that is a companion to this website @genreonlinenet on YouTube. I will post a link to the channel beneath the screenshot. Thank you.
Back on April 28th of 2001 I appeared on the cover of the Technology section of the New York Times. The world was a very different place back then. People still used dialup to go online, YouTube did not exist and one can argue that despite being an ISP, America Online is kind of the Facebook before Facebook. I kind of miss AOL. It was for its time a reliable and safe service. I started out writing reviews on Usenet groups of movies I liked and that grew to me doing DVD reviews online for various websites and from there it evolved to starting what would become GenreOnlinenet.net in 1999 on free AOL website space using a free program called AOL Press. Eventually my reviews were quoted online in a magazines like Entertainment Weekly and I was interviewed by The New York Times. I covered VCDs of American films that at the time were not yet available in the U.S. the idea being that since VCDs were backwardly compatible with DVD players and could be played on CD-ROM drives, they were a compliment to DVD and a way of increasing your library until certain films finally arrived on DVD. It also was my way of helping to fight the Pay Per View Divx format that no one thinks about anymore, but back in 1997 when DVD was just starting to get rolled out, was the Circuit City competition that tanked as DVD over took LaserDisc as the best way to view movies as home until it overtook VHS and was eventually succeeded by Blu-ray Disc. I have been around a long time and I started this channel as a companion to my website/blog, which is why you see links to news and reviews I post there. On the about section of this channel you will find many links related to my website and my writing as well as this New York Times article. Unfortunately the New York Times charges readers to look at old archived articles online so odds are if you click on the link, you might be asked ton subscribe to the New York Times. So I can’t post the article here because technically it is the property of the Times, but through quick reflexes and a lot of screenshots, I finally got a sample of the article I was interviewed in. It is only one page, but it references ms as I was interviewed for it and I am proud of it and grateful too. I have the page from the newspaper itself professionally framed in my office. However this is all I can share from that time. So thank you all so much for your support. It means a great deal to me. Now here is the screenshot I was able to take from The NY Times app. It is just the beginning, but I am also grateful that I can share a part of it with all of you and you don’t have to subscribe to the New York Times to read it. So here is the article screenshot and thank you everyone.
https://youtube.com/@genreonlinenet?si=QIrNlhrSL8F-S4IQ
Thank you.
Sincerely,
Mark Rivera.
