Will the iPad or iTablet save newspapers and magazines?

Submitted by acohill on Thu, 12/03/2009 - 17:29

With newspapers and magazines going belly up almost weekly, is there any hope for them? The much speculated upon iPad or iTablet from Apple may end up saving the day. Part of the appeal of a newspaper or magazine is the convenience--easy to carry, easy to read, and you can get up close with them. It's hard to get up close to your computer, even a laptop, the same way. The mouse or a trackpad is no substitute for just turning the page. But what if you could subscribe to Sports Illustrated and have it turn up on a light, easy to use tablet device with full color, high resolution images and text that looked just like, well, a magazine page?

One thing that could happen is that we could break out of or away from the Web browser as the catch all container for content. Why or how would this happen? Just look at the iPhone. It comes with a Web browser, but Apple's superb operating system and programming interface makes it easy to create custom applications for specialized content. So when you subscribe to Sports Illustrated, you don't view through the still clunky Web browser, but instead view it using a specially designed application that really unleashes the content and graphic design without the legacy restrictions that have to be dragged along when squeezing content through a Web browser.

As the Internet destroys old business models, it enables the creation of new ones. We may be at the dawn of the golden age of newspapers and magazines, if they can just let go of the paper and barrels of ink they keep in the back room.

Oh, and one more thing....

If you play the YouTube demo of Sports Illustrated, you will notice they plan to include high resolution video, which will really change the way we think about newspapers and magazines--suddenly a magazine looks a lot like a TV channel. Interesting all by itself, but when we all sit down to the breakfast table in the morning with our coffee and iTablets to read/watch the news, guess what we will need?

Bandwidth. Lots of it. More than you are going to be able squeeze over WiFi connections. Fiber to the home is the only technology that will deliver the bandwidth for these next generation news and magazine services. Communities that are building fiber to the home, next generation infrastructure will have a huge edge over communities that rely on incumbent copper-based solutions or wireless only.