British firm Future has been one of the more successful magazine publishers on tablets, reporting in November 2012 that it was selling $1m of digital editions a month on tablets.
Having started by digitising issues of its existing print magazines, Future moved on to launching new tablet-only titles like Tap!, Photography Week and tech. Now they're being joined on iPad by another new launch: Football Week.
Due to go live on Friday 1 February, it's a weekly football magazine for iPad focusing on the English Premier League, produced in partnership with the Press Association.
Every Friday, a new issue will be delivered to subscribers' tablets with a mixture of match previews, features, team news and stats. But the big selling point is the way it will pull in live feeds from PA during the weekend's matches: text commentary, in-game stats and post-match analysis.
Readers will get a five-issue trial for free, before being asked to pay a monthly subscription of £3.99, a yearly subscription of £19.99 or £1.99 for a single-issue download.
"It's the first project from an ongoing partnership between us and the Press Association, bringing the expertise of both to market," says Mike Goldsmith, Future's digital editions editor-in-chief.
"PA provide content from both their library content and live feeds, and we curate it. Curation being design, writing and the extra commissioning of new content that hasn't been seen before. This isn't just a feed-reader."
Football Week has been produced using Future's in-house FutureFolio software, which Goldsmith says made something like this new app possible, as well as ensuring it could be done in the six months since PA first approached him.
"We said wouldn't it be great if we could take feeds and, rather than just popping up a website, we could design and style them up, and make them look just as good as traditional not-live production content."
It's part magazine, part website and part Zeebox-style second-screen TV app, in that Future hopes football fans will be using it on their laps while sitting on the sofa watching televised matches.
The lap-sitting leanback aspect to Football Week might lead you to think it's a landscape-orientation app. It's actually portrait-only though.
"We definitely wanted to up the magazineyness of it," says Goldsmith. "From our research, people do like reading these digital editions in that format. We've also tried to make it look and feel quite high-end, to let the content breathe and enable us to have all these updates coming in."
PA isn't the only partner for the app: EA Sports is on board with a section devoted to its FIFA 13 game, and its FIFA Ultimate Team mode. Meanwhile, website PhysioRoom.com will provide a feed of injury news, plugging a gap in PA's data.
Football Week's announcement earlier in January came the day after News International revealed it had spent £25m acquiring video highlights rights for Premier League matches, with plans to offer the clips within the apps for The Times, Sunday Times and The Sun.
Coming together, the two announcements emphasised the way boundaries are blurring between what magazines, newspapers, broadcasters and websites are offering.
"The boundaries are blurring," says Goldsmith. "It sounds like such a cliche, but there is no manual for this. We're making something that's as beautiful as a magazine, but as live and relevant as a website. It's been really enjoyable, and also a real rollercoaster."
An iPad-only rollercoaster for now, although Goldsmith says Future is mulling how this kind of magazine could and should work on iPhone: "I'm not sure anyone's really cracked that yet," says Goldsmith. The obvious question concerns non-iOS platforms though: Android for starters.
Apple has been a good partner for Future, and vice versa: it was one of the first publishers to use in-app subscriptions in early 2011, and by November 2012 had grossed more than £6m in sales on the iOS Newsstand.
"Apple has trained an audience to put in their password and to pay for content. Android, per se as a thing, has not done that, and the user experience was not fun," says Goldsmith. Even so, he's optimistic about the potential beyond iOS.
"It's not so much Android now. It's Amazon, it's Google and it's Microsoft. Those people have the same level of expertise at making sure the audience experience when they're going in is a good one," he says.
"You can buy Future's portfolio digital editions on Kindle Fire and Google Play, and our job is to make sure our products are available in as many places as possible."
Goldsmith started his career at Future as a staff writer, and still considers himself as a journalist. How does he feel with that hat on about the opportunities presenting themselves with tablet magazines?
"The best thing I can think about tablets as a creator of content is that I can put something on there, and it can still be beautiful," he says.
"We can still give readers a beautiful experience, and better still, when I hit the 'publish' button, I can publish that globally and reach new people. Yet it's still part of this curated experience. That feels really good to me."
No comments:
Post a Comment