Magazines Introduce a Netflix for Tablet Editions (interesting approach to publishing, marketing)

The country's biggest print publishers are introducing a Netflix-style service for magazine tablet editions, offering unlimited titles and issues for a flat monthly fee.

The Next Issue Media newsstand

The Next Issue Media newsstand

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The service, from Next Issue Media -- a joint venture of Conde Nast, Time Inc., Hearst, Meredith and News Corp.--prices unlimited monthly and biweekly titles at $9.99 per month. A premium version that also includes weeklies costs $14.99 per month. Consumers will read the titles on Next Issue Media's new app.

At its start the service is limited to certain Android devices such as the Samsung Galaxy Tab and the Motorola Xoom, but Next Issue Media plans to seek Apple's's approval for an iPad version in coming weeks.

Subscriptions to many monthlies' tablet editions cost $1.99 per month, so consumers could get their money's worth from the basic $9.99 plan if they read five or more tablet editions a month.

But consumers who prefer print can still find very competitive pricing there. Fitness magazine is available in print right now, for example, at $5.99 for a whole year. And subscribers to Time Inc. and Conde Nast magazines already get their corresponding tablet editions at no extra cost.

Whether all that unnecessarily limits the plan's appeal or productively protects print editions will depend on your perspective. Wenner Media Chairman Jann Wenner warned last year that publishers might be unnecessarily rushing to tablet editions at the expense of their print products.

But the Netflix-style plan could also expand magazine consumption.

Consumers seem happy enough buying print magazines on a title-by-title basis -- much the way they rented or bought DVDs individually before Netflix came along -- but digital delivery's instant gratification could make a buffet approach more appealing.

"What we know from consumers in other categories is that when they have an option to pay for something on an unlimited basis, they consume more in that category as a result," said Steve Sachs, exec VP-consumer marketing and sales at Time Inc.

Next Issue Media's new app also allows consumers to read each participating magazine's tablet edition in one place, hopefully eliminating some of the friction that comes with downloading a different app for each magazine and figuring out a new navigation scheme for many.

The monthlies and bimonthlies currently covered by the basic $9.99 plan are All You, Allure, Better Homes and Gardens, Car and Driver, Coastal Living, Conde Nast Traveler, Cooking Light, Elle, Esquire, Essence, Fitness, Fortune, Glamour, Golf, Health, InStyle, Money, Parents, People en Espanol, People StyleWatch, Popular Mechanics, Real Simple, Southern Living, Sports Illustrated Kids, Sunset, This Old House and Vanity Fair. The weeklies in the premium plan are Entertainment Weekly, People, Sports Illustrated, The New Yorker and Time.

Next Issue Media's app also sells titles on a single-copy basis.

Users Engage Video More on Tablets vs. Desktops

Ooyala: Users Engage Video More on Tablets vs. Desktops

Just how is video viewed? It's a timeless question with an ever-changing answer as new devices and services enter the market. And don't forget about the users, either: They're ultimately the ones doing all the viewing, and their preferences are what device manufacturers, Web services, and advertisers have been trying to nail down for years.

Ooyala, a video hosting platform, thinks it has the answers as the result of a deep dive into its database of viewing statistics – the results of which have been distributed in the company's first-ever quarterly report on video viewership. And here are the big takeaways for Q3 2011: Here come the tablets, here comes the iPad, and here comes a lot of Facebook sharing.

Specifically, Ooyala's metrics found that users viewing videos on tablet devices were "most engaged" with videos over any other medium, including smartphones, desktop PCs, and living room devices (consoles, set-top boxes, et cetera). By that, we meant that tablet users were most likely to continue watching a video anywhere from one-fourth of its duration all the way to its very end. In total, tablet users watched an average of 28 percent more video per play than their desktop counterparts.

Desktop video viewing still reigns supreme for total videos played and hours watched. However, desktop and laptop users were far more likely to watch short clips – 52 percent of all recorded video views were for clips under three minutes, on average. A total of 42 percent of all videos watched on tablets were greater than 10 minutes in length. But that's almost a drop in the bucket compared to videos viewed on set-top boxes and gaming consoles, where 75 percent of all videos watched were greater than 10 minutes long.

Focusing in on tablets, the iPad took the lion's share of video viewing in Ooyala's report: 97.4 percent of all tablet video plays and 95.7 percent of all video hours streamed. But Apple's commanding presence isn't quite so powerful in Ooyala's smartphone analytics, where iPhones only accounted for 56.2 percent of all video plays (to Android's 36.8 percent) and 44.4 percent of total hours played (to Android's 49.1 percent).

When it comes to finding and sharing videos, Ooyala found that Facebook generally beats Twitter. However, the ratio of Facebook video shares to Twitter video shares – as measured by Ooyala – differs dramatically by region. Italian video watchers were 17 times more likely to share videos on Facebook than Twitter, whereas the ratio became nearly 1:1 in countries like Japan.

Ooyala's study focused on video metrics measured between July 1 and September 30, taken as a cross-section of the company's consumer and partner database. According to Ooyala, more than 100 million unique users watch a video delivered by the company's platform each month.

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