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The iPad Will Get Playboy In March
Stoobalou writes "Playboy boss Hugh Hefner has confirmed that — despite Steve Jobs' protestations that Apple is pure and Android is for porn — an app for browsing uncensored back issues of Playboy is to launch later this year on the iPad. The news, which is likely to generate significantly more buzz for Apple's popular tablet as a publishing device than Rupert Murdoch's delayed digital newspaper The Daily, comes courtesy of Hefner's Twitter stream, in which he proclaimed: 'Big news! Playboy — both old & new — will be available on [the] iPad beginning in March.'"
*an emaciated Steve Jobs returns from medical leave* ... ack! uck!
Lord Jobs: Why is there porn on my iPad, Captain Cook?!
Tim Cook: Uh, well, you see, the uh, engineers they
*Jobs holds up his fingers pinched together*
Lord Jobs: You have failed me for the last time, Captain.
My work here is dung.
...for the articles.
If you think Playboy is porn, you really need to get out of the basement. Playboy is to porn what Disneyworld is to authenticity.
Very often, people confuse simple with simplistic. The nuance is lost on most. - Clement Mok
It's damned hard to masturbate while trying to trying to balance a netbook. The iPad is the right tool for the job.
Maybe you should tell that to the iphone app developers that got kicked out of the App store for being "porn" despite only showing girls in bikinis.
I really wish Americans valued the freedom of others to make personal choices, even if those choices are ones they wish others would not make. I really wish there were more people that hated white power literature, but would raise hell when big companies presumed to refuse to let them make an individual choice about buying it or not. I really wish it wasn't good business for Apple, Amazon, Walmart, etc. to censor and limit the content they sell in order to cater to busybodies that don't want other people to have the opportunity to make choices the majority does not like. I wish we were living in the freedom loving, individual rights valuing country a subset of our founding fathers envisioned.
It's great that people have decided playboy isn't so bad or something, but I don't really care. I wish, instead, people were pressuring Apple to become common carriers of content, dedicated to being neutral and letting users choose for themselves.
Winston Churchill and a socialite at a party:
Churchill: Madam, would you sleep with me for five million pounds?
Socialite: My goodness, Mr. Churchill... Well, I suppose we would have to discuss terms, of course...
Churchill: Would you sleep with me for five pounds?
Socialite: Mr. Churchill, what kind of woman do you think I am?!
Churchill: Madam, we’ve already established that. Now we are haggling about the price.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
You think with a name like iPad they would serve up Playgirl
/rimshot
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
While the article talks about an 'app' for the iPad, Hugh never wrote about an app. To be more precise he wrote "Big news! Playboy--both old & new--will be available on iPad beginning in March." http://twitter.com/#hughhefner/status/27551318994325504
In later tweets he refers to 'Playboy on iPad', again without the word 'app'.
Based on earlier rumors we will either see a new Magazine store for the iPad (with subscriptions and a different policy) or Hugh is just making headlines by announcing a plain old HTML version optimized for iPad.
The added value of those apps may be questionable (I guess they exist for people who can't open the browser and look for bikini-clad girls that way), but they should be held to the same criteria as any Playboy app.
They are. One particular criteria that mattered here was "are you an established, respected brand?".
If there will be a policy change it would seem that Playboy would be at an advantage by having a headstart by knowing this change would come ahead of time, most likely due to discussion between them and those responsible at Apple.
I don't see why this should be a problem. First off, Playboy has an advantage over them by simply being Playboy. Second, it's pretty clear that Apple is working closely with magazines right now to get the subscription model right.
In either case Apple would apparently be giving Playboy preferential treatment.
You state this like it's some bad thing. Apple always asks a few respected members of whatever industry they are going into to help them get it right. They did this with music, with video, with iOS apps. And they are doing this now as well. It's very rational.
Which wouldn't be -entirely- surprising, given Apple's recent re-iteration that they're not fond of apps from publishers that simply link people to the online content where the user then has to pay for the subscription - thus skirting Apple's desire to take a good chunk of advertising income / subscription fees by running this through their infrastructure.
It's difficult to say how much the 30% revenue plays a role in these sorts of decisions. Apple spends a lot on keeping the stores and the infrastructures running smoothly (watch how fast that 10 billion download counter is spinning, and that doesn't even count upgrades). But more to the point, every time there is a decision like this which benefits Apple financially outside of their core profit models, their decision also tends to add far more value to their core product than it generates in direct revenue. On the topic of magazine subscriptions specifically, just like the rest of the store, the iOS platform benefits immensely by being absolutely simple. If you have to manage your subscriptions individually with each magazine (or each publisher) it's going to be inefficient and people who would otherwise like to subscribe will not due to the hassle involved. On the other hand, if it all goes through the very same login and credit card that you use to buy music, tv, films, apps, books, etc., then it's going to be just as easy as those things, and people will be more likely to make use of it. This also provides a significant value to the consumer over Android, which has almost no unifying feature at all (something which geeks love, but consumers hate).
So I really doubt that 30% is the primary motivating factor here. Apple sold over 60 million iOS devices since late September. Their core profit center is in hardware. If they can bolster the value of their hardware, that's gotta be their primary goal. If they can make some extra cash along the way, that's great, but I suspect the motivation is to use that cut primarily to cover operating costs and invest in expansion, so that they essentially get their "value multiplier" that is iTunes (many geeks hate, but consumers love) for free. It's absolutely brilliant, and their numbers from yesterday prove this out.