There’s a line in this report about iVerse raising $4 million in funding that caught my eye:
Among the product offerings iVerse plans to enhance are its PLUS feature, which allows streaming video content for digital comics on iOS.
After getting over my first response of “Streaming video content for digital comics? Oh no, it’s Motion Comics all over again!”, I started wondering what uses streaming video could have for digital comics. Some creators have, in the past, talked about the idea of embedding extra information into digital comics, so that readers could get a more involved reading experience – Could this be a possible use for this kind of thing? Or what about a video (or audio) commentary track, page-by-page?
iVerse has, sadly, somewhat fallen to the wayside as ComiXology and Graphic.ly have become more popular platforms for digital comics, but this kind of innovation could point to a way that they could make a comeback, as well as a way forward for digital comics as a format. It’ll be interesting to see what (if anything) comes of this new round of funding, and experimentation.
