• LeVar Burton Hands-On With The New Reading Rainbow App [TCTV]

    Colleen Taylor

    Colleen Taylor is based in San Francisco where she is a reporter for TechCrunch and TechCrunch TV. Previously she worked as a reporter for GigaOM, the Financial Times’ Mergermarket newswire, and the semiconductor industry newsletter Electronic News. Disclosure: Colleen holds a small amount of shares in AOL, which were awarded as part of her employment contract with TechCrunch. She personally... → Learn More

    Wednesday, June 20th, 2012


    As you may have read minutes ago here on TechCrunch, there’s a brand new iPad app on the market that brings the best of the Reading Rainbow show that many of us loved so much as kids to the current generation of budding bookworms.

    So it was a real treat to have LeVar Burton, the super popular film and television actor and director who was also — of course — the host of the long-running Reading Rainbow show on PBS swing by TechCrunch TV to give us the first-hand pitch on the app that he helped to develop.

    Watch the video above to get the full rundown on why digital apps are the new frontier for projects like Reading Rainbow, keeping a book-like feel in a high-tech device like the iPad, how he first connected with his co-founder Mark Wolfe, how being an tech entrepreneur compares to a successful career in entertainment, and a hands-on demo from Burton himself of the brand new Reading Rainbow app.