Rupert Murdoch’s highly-anticipated, heavily-staffed, apparently-delayed iPad publication “The Daily” appears to have a launch date. Or week.
Several reports had “The Daily” debuting this month. According to Peter Kafka, who blogs for News Corp.-owned All Things Digital, the company now plans to launch it the week of January 17.
There are few new details — “it will sell for 99 cents a week, it will use lots of video and it will have cool multimedia bells and whistles, including some kind of 3-D effect that lots of people are very excited about” — but Kafka reveals one that could prove significant for other publishers looking to break into the iPad publishing business:
The Daily is supposed to use a new “push” subscription feature from Apple, where iTunes automatically bills customers on a weekly or monthly basis, and a new edition shows up on customers’ iPads every morning.
That is a new wrinkle to the way Apple has to this point handled the iPad versions for other publishers — allowing them only to sell single copies of iPad editions of magazines, say, rather than continuous, rolling subscriptions.
[Photo illustration: TheWrap]
