Apple on Monday announced that it’s buying Texture, a digital magazine service.
Operated by Next Issue Media LLC, Texture provides subscribers with unlimited access to their favorite digital magazines for one subscription fee of $9.99 per month.
Financial terms were not disclosed.
Eddy Cue, Apple’s Senior Vice President of Internet Software and Services, said:
We’re excited Texture will join Apple, along with an impressive catalog of magazines from many of the world’s leading publishers. We are committed to quality journalism from trusted sources and allowing magazines to keep producing beautifully designed and engaging stories for users.
Texture provides lifetime access to entire issues of more than 200 of the world’s best magazines. Since its inception eight years ago, Texture has become the leading multi-title subscription service hosting digital editions of such magazines as People, Vogue, Rolling Stone, National Geographic, GQ, Sports Illustrated, Wired, Maxim, Men’s Health, GQ, Bloomberg Businessweek, ESPN The Magazine, Entertainment Weekly and more.
Apple in 2016 featured Texture as part of its annual Best Of selections.
“We could not imagine a better home or future for the service,” said Next Issue Media CEO John Loughlin. The service is currently owned by publishers Condé Nast, Hearst, Meredith, Rogers Media and KKR.
Following the removal of the Newsstand app from iOS, Apple has been encouraging developers to publish digital magazines as apps and sell them using Apple’s in-app subscription feature.
I do hope that this acquisition ultimately results in some sort of iBooks for magazines or a completely rethought Newsstand, if you will, where I’d pay a monthly subscription fee in exchange for unlimited access to some of the most widely-read magazines in the digital form.
It could also perhaps hint at Apple’s Prime-like subscription service that some analysts have been calling for where you’d pay Apple a single monthly fee for unlimited access to streaming music, movies and TV shows, digital magazines and other perks.
According to Cue at SXSW 2018, they’ll integrate Texture content into Apple News.
Thoughts?