Apple was never going to revolutionise the publishing industry by itself.
The music industry was vastly different back in 2003 – the iTunes Store was the first major (legal) digital music platform.
– iTunes revolutionised the record store, not the radio.
Most major newspapers and magazines have published their content to their websites for years, albeit with limited financial success.
Most have since developed their own iPad apps, albeit with limited success in terms of design and usability.
Newsstand – launched two years after the iPad – is by no means revolutionary, but it provides publishers with high profile channel for their content on a well-established platform.
Newsstand is simply a folder on devices where publication apps reside, and a section of the store where they can be browsed and downloaded.
Individual issues or continuing subscriptions can be purchased from within each app, and the latest issues can be downloaded automatically in the background.
The brilliance of this app model is that it puts the onus on the content publishers to be a part of the platform by developing their own apps and publishing through Apple’s channel.
This doesn’t seem far from a win-win-win game for publishers, consumers, and Apple – publishers have a high-profile channel for their content with control over how it is presented, consumers have choice, and Apple gets 30%.
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Apple is never going to revolutionise the TV industry by itself.
But with its established platforms, experience with media publishers, infrastructure, and cash, Apple could significantly influence the TV industry with a similar strategy to Newsstand.
– Daring Fireball: Apps Are the New Channels
Apple provides the platform and the audience – tens of millions of devices – that media publishers can access by publishing through Apple’s channel.
The ability to develop apps for the existing – or rumoured – Apple TV devices could be all that’s needed to revolutionise TV.
– The revolution of TV is simply a shift from the constant stream, over-the-air, to on-demand, online.
Time-shifting via recording has been a mid-way step.
Most major TV networks already have iOS apps offering live streaming or on-demand programming within their existing commercial models – advertising or subscriptions.
This model puts the networks in control publishing their content through a new channel.
This new channel would undoubtedly co-exist alongside the over-the-air model for many years.
But there’s “something there” that perhaps only Apple could ignite.
