“Amazon.com Inc. expressed interest in buying Texture before Apple Inc. acquired the digital magazine service, according to a person familiar with the matter,” Alex Barinka reports for Bloomberg. “Next Issue Media LLC, owner of Texture, hired investment bank Moelis & Co. in the past year to advise on a sale process, said the person, who asked not to be identified because the matter is private.”
“Apple said on Monday it agreed to buy the firm, without disclosing the price. The transaction included an upfront payment, as well as significant licensing fees to publishers, the person also said,” Barinka reports. “Texture, offered via the app stores of Apple, Google and Amazon, lets users subscribe to more than 200 magazines for $9.99 a month. The service bolsters Apple’s efforts in online services and media. ”
Barinka reports, “For Amazon, it would have fit well with a customer base already trained to pay for physical products and some digital content.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: We’re excited to see what Apple does with the service.
SEE ALSO:
Apple pushes deeper into news – March 13, 2018
Apple to acquire Next Issue Media and its digital magazine-subscription service Texture – March 12, 2018
If Amazon had purchased Texture I suppose they would have expanded the number of magazines available for viewing as part of the Prime subscription (61 titles currently https://www.amazon.com/kindle-dbs/fd/prime-pr-magazines) and/or part of the Kindle Unlimited subscription. With Apple purchasing Texture they’re now ‘in the game’ for all-you-can-read magazine subscription plans.
Apple is being left behind in the battle for content outside of apps. Why did they partner with Amazon (Audible) for audio books? And for that matter, why do they store iCloud data on Amazon and Google servers? I am a big Apple fan, but it seems they’re leaving a lot on the table. They have the cash, do they lack the specialized talent? Am I missing something?
I don’t think you’re missing anything. It is extremely common for Apple to outsource many things including manufacturing, assembly, cloud storage, etc. to maximize profit.
Consider that if for example Apple should increase its physical cloud storage facilities, owning the building and computing HW is only the tip of the iceberg for TCO. They will have to pay for power or at least the facilities to generate power, manpower to manage all the HW, cooling systems to keep the equipment running efficiently, and so on.
Yes, from that business perspective, I can understand. But what about the ecosystem and security, and just dominating the vertical supply chain? Content supplied by outside creatives is great! But owning the infrastructure and pipes to move content to the consumer, I would think gives them more control and less dependence on competitors, and more security for their customers. I would expect they could make some profit by owning and operating the entire iCloud infrastructure, and even if it wasn’t as profitable, their ecosystem would be completely under their control. Perhaps they need a plausible excuse should something go wrong?
I would not be surprised if building their own infra would come more expensive. Apple sure knows the numbers and discounts in deals of this scale can be enormous. Amazon and Google also get their bragging rights “even Apple trusts their users data to us”, so they can up-sell to everybody else.
And I would not be surprised if Amazon and Google sell their service to Apple at loss. Bragging rights, taking business away from a competitor, having huge discounts from hardware and software vendors are just a few reasons. You need a lot of hard drives to store iCloud data, what if you put all your drives you need in one order and buy in bulk with a deep discount. Nobody also question why Amazon/Google do not manufacture their own hard drives.
Amazon selling their services to Apple at a loss? C’mon. All Wall Street ever does is praise AWS to high heaven and chirps constantly about how Amazon is making huge amounts of money from it. Amazon owns the entire cloud business as far as Wall Street is concerned. I’d hardly think Amazon is taking any losses.
Wasn’t Apple bragging about all the huge data centers it was building over the years. Exactly what are those being used for? Apple doesn’t seem to generate any money from them and apparently there aren’t enough of them if Apple has to constantly go to competitors for storage space. I’ll admit that it’s somewhat puzzling to me why Apple is pinching pennies while sitting on a huge mountain of cash.
It scares me to think about which competitor Apple is going to run to if Apple starts a video streaming business. Apple video streaming hosted by AWS? I’m sorry but I don’t like the sound of that. That will double Amazon’s dominant cloud mindset and share price as well. Apple should have more than enough money to own all the individual parts of a video streaming business if Amazon can afford it.
Apple just wants to sell iPhones and rent music. Apparently nothing else matters.
Hey, just a heads up. I ran across this 3 month for $10 deal at Amazon a couple days ago for Texture. (Normally $10 per mo at the App Store) Installed on iPhone 7+ just fine, you just sign in with amazon creds.
Review: First take, this f**kin blows, like I’m really gonna pinch and zoom into this tiny text to read articles. But …. once you start looking around, a lot of the articles have been reformatted to fit an iPhone. I have a feeling that Apple will be turning the whole app into view. Or at least I hope so.
Does double tap to zoom-in and zoom-out work? I would think that would be a useful addition if not.