By Next Issue Media, the company who provides digital distribution of popular consumer magazines, has announced plans to bring their service to Android in early 2011. It’s been described as the “Hulu for magazines,” except they won’t be blocking any and everything Google and Android as Hulu does. (Sorry, I had to throw that pot shot out there.)
CEO Morgan Geunther says that the choice to bring this to Android devices first wasn’t because they favored Android over the popular iOS platform, but because Apple’s terms did not lend themselves well to a lot of the publishers Next Issue is partnered up with. Thus, they’re using Android as the next best platform to show Apple that they should consider changing their stance on magazine publishers.
We’ll embrace you with open arms, Next Issue! [via ATD]
When I saw Hulu for magaznes, my first thought was access would be blocked on every machine ever made, and NOBODY would be able to view the content.
that looks like a nook on the far right. with a color screen instead of monochrome e-ink. wat.
So what will it cost? Their site is geared towards the publishers not the consumers.
In their defense, that policy has absolutely nothing to do with Hulu and everything to do with content owners refusing to allow access on certain devices. I’m sure Hulu would love to be able to carry all kinds of shows, get tons of traffic, make tons of money, etc. but the studios and networks make way too much money from TV ads and iTunes downloads so they don’t want free streaming on your TV of mobile device when they can help it. Only decent workaround on the TV is just to use a PC hooked up to the TV. It’s actually a great setup. I always try to use the best monitor in the house and in my case it’s the HDTV in the living room.
cable TV industry is so nonsensical, first you pay for them, then they show you ads at every 5 seconds, they need to be taken down.
@Bob: Nah, it’s a free market. Just don’t buy the service if you don’t find it worth the cost. Same as anything else. It’s the only way to change that anyway.
Regardless, this isn’t about cable TV. Cable is just the “carrier”. It’s mainly the Foxes and NBCs etc. who take issue here. They buy or produce that content and their people figure out how to make a return on the millions that go into creating the content. Like any other for-profit business they are interested in maximizing profits so if their bean counters figure that they make more from TV advertisers and iTunes downloads than they would make from streaming video, then obviously they won’t want streaming video to cut into that whole deal.
The problem is that for the audience (us) we don’t really care about how much of a profit they make but we do care about things like convenience and variety. The whole Hulu and GoogleTV thing is an example of how a portion of the audience is at odds with the people who produce or buy the content. My prediction is that for now the demand for alternate viewing methods is small because most older people don’t think about watching videos on their phones and they don’t have computers hooked up to their HDTVs. They think of TV as cable or dish or antenna. Google and friends have tried meeting halfway with stripped down computers that can do some of what a HTPC can do as a kind of bridge between the HTPC crowd and the set-top-box crowd. Content owners see this as a foot in the doorway for IPTV and pull access for just that reason. People won’t switch off their cable as long as they can’t get American Idol on their Boxee Box or Google TV but as soon as people have computers hooked up to their TVs it can get pretty hard to justify that $75-100/month cable bill. This scares the crap out of some people and they will do anything to keep stuff like GoogleTV from selling. They don’t mind AppleTV so much because it’s just an iTunes shopping cart but a streaming PC hooked up to the TV is a big threat.