The move comes on the heels of earlier news that a rumored sale of Time Warner magazines to Iowa-based Meredith has fallen through. Under the terms of that proposed deal, Meredith would have acquired lifestyle and women’s interest brands like People.

Instead, Time Warner’s magazines will be slotted into a stand-alone corporation last year. In the company’s news release, CEO Jeff Bewkes said the move would be similar to earlier spin-offs involving Time Warner Cable and AOL.

“After a thorough review of options, we believe that a separation will better position both Time Warner and Time Inc. A complete spin-off of Time Inc. provides strategic clarity for Time Warner Inc., enabling us to focus entirely on our television networks and film and TV production businesses, and improves our growth profile,” said Bewkes, adding that current Time Inc. CEO Laura Lang will stay on in the short term for the transition but will soon step down.

The spin-off is likely to mean layoffs or closures at the newly independent magazine entity. In recent years, Time Warner has reaped large profits on its TV content but the magazines, despite their iconic status, have struggled in the face of an ongoing secular decline.

The split also mirrors what took place at media giant News Corp., which last year announced plans to move its publishing assets into a separate company.

According to New York Times sources, the Meredith deal failed to come through after Time Warner could not agree on money nor on what to do with four core titles — Time, Sports Illustrated, Fortune and Money — that Meredith did not want to take on.

Time Warner has not indicated how much equity it will retain in the newly spun-off corporation nor whether it will keep the “Time” in its name in the future. Not long ago, the company was known as AOL Time Warner; now, the Warner part is all that is left.

The service offers unlimited access to over 80 magazines on iPad, up from 39 at launch. Users can choose between an “unlimited basic” subscription, which offers access to monthly magazines like Glamour, Wired and Food & Wine for $9.99 per month, and an “unlimited premium” subscription, for $14.99 per month, that also includes weekly titles like People, New York, New Yorker and Sports Illustrated.

Next Issue Media, which started out in 2009 as a joint venture of Condé Nast, Hearst, Time Inc., News Corp and Meredith, was initially only available for Android 3.0 (Honeycomb) tablets before expanding to iPad — and, potentially, a wider audience — last July.

The Windows 8 launch is “the first time we’ve worked closely with a platform partner,” CEO Morgan Guenther told me. The app integrates features like “snap view” and multitasking from Microsoft’s interface; the software giant is also providing marketing and will feature the app in the Windows App store. “We saw the importance of moving beyond the tablet,” Guenther said, and Microsoft was a “motivated partner.”

Next Issue hopes that users will use the platform across devices. A single subscription can be authenticated on up to five devices. “With greater choice as to where, when and how they access their magazines, users can seamlessly switch from their tablet at home, to their Ultrabook on the road, to their company PC,” John Richards, senior director of Windows app marketing for Microsoft, said in a statement.

Less than half of Next Issue’s users pay

Discovery remains “an issue” on iPad, Guenther said, partly because the Next Issue iPad app isn’t available through Apple Newsstand. The company projects that by the end of this quarter, it will have about 120,000 total users — 50,000 of whom are actually paying for a subscription. Of that 50,000, about 60 percent have a premium subscription, Guenther said, and 40 percent have a basic subscription. The remaining 70,000 or so users are “authenticators” — users who already have a print subscription to a magazine and are accessing the print version through next Issue’s app.

In the next quarter, Next Issue plans to add Facebook integration and social sharing, followed by the integration of “clipping” technology that would let users virtually save individual articles or images from magazines. Guenther also says the library will expand to about 100 titles in the next couple of months.

Though Next Issue originally launched on Android, that platform hasn’t been much of a priority, Guenther said — to the extent that there are only 36 magazines available, less than half the number of titles available for iPad and Windows 8. In the next few months the company will “refresh” the experience on Android, Guenther said. It also plans to expand to Android smartphones and iPhones.

According to the Fortune article, which cited unidentified sources:

In one scenario, most of the company’s publishing titles, such as People, InStyle, and Real Simple, would be carved out and rolled into an independent company and sold to the undisclosed buyer. Under this plan, Time Warner would maintain control of at least three titles – Time, Sports Illustrated, and Fortune – according to the sources. A Time Warner spokesman says, “We never comment on speculations of this nature.”

The New York Times, also citing unidentified sources, elaborated that “Meredith did not express interest in purchasing Time Inc.’s sluggish news titles.”

In 2012, Time Inc. contributed $3.4 billion in revenue to Time Warner’s total revenues of $28.7 billion — a decline from 2011, which the company attributed to lower subscription and advertising revenues. The publishing division laid off about 500 people — roughly 6 percent of its global workforce — in January.

It’s unclear who a potential buyer for Time Inc. might be. BDT Capital, the bank that Fortune reports is involved in the deal, has ties to Warren Buffett, leading AdAge to speculate that Buffett could be involved in the deal.

This story was updated at 5:00 p.m. ET to reflect reports from the WSJ and NYT that Time Inc.’s potential buyer is Meredith.

We do — that was that state of digital media when paidContent launched in 2002. Other weird things were happening back then too: People still got much of their news from television and newspapers, and they learned about major events after they had already happened.

There have been some huge shifts since 2002: Tablets and smartphones are now ubiquitous, lots of people read on their digital devices, and just about everyone is part of a social network or three. This summer is the tenth anniversary of our launch. In an effort to gain some perspective on the past decade in digital media, I’ve been reading back through paidContent’s archives — a collection of over 80,000 posts.

Since I was only a freshman in college when paidContent came to life, I often didn’t know, as I read through the stories from the early days, how things had begun or how they turned out. As I watched them unfold, I wanted to grab our readers’ arms and give them advice (“Don’t buy that Zune!” “Invest in Facebook!” “Go for the good Twitter handle now!”). But I also realized how difficult it is to predict success.

Some takeaways from my trip through the archives:  Some companies — AOL and Yahoo come to mind — have been consistently bad at predicting what consumers want. And a couple of companies, namely Apple and Amazon, have been very good at it. Also, being a native digital company helps, but it’s no guarantee of success (what up, MySpace?). And after all these years, it’s still not clear what content customers will pay for, or how much they’ll pay.

Streaming and Moviebeaming

What do analysts, CEOs and bloggers have in common? None of us can predict the future. Roger Ebert joked in 2002 that “on-demand streaming movies on the Web, like HDTV, are five years in the future — and will be for at least another 10 years.”

If Disney’s Moviebeam had been the only game in town, Ebert probably would have been right. When it launched in three cities in 2003, customers paid $6.99 a month to use a device that could hold 100 movies and plugged into the back of a TV set. They also had to pay for each movie they watched– billing was done via the phone line. The company went through various unsuccessful iterations before India’s Valuable Group bought it in 2008. It was never heard from again.

Netflix almost went down the same road. It had a plan to release a Moviebeam-like “proprietary set-top box with an Internet connection that could download movies overnight.” But instead, it decided to forge ahead with streaming — starting with a complicated “quota hours” system in 2007 and moving to unlimited streaming in 2008. By 2010, the majority of subscribers were streaming something, and the company began offering streaming-only subscriptions, though CEO Reed Hastings said that same year that the company would keep shipping DVDs until 2030. (We’ll see about that.)

ABC was the first network to sell episodes of its shows on iTunes, back in 2006, and to stream shows free with ads on ABC.com — and later on AOL. But by the time premium subscription service Hulu Plus launched in 2010, the platforms getting the attention were devices with built-in access, like Internet-enabled TVs, Blu-ray players, and tablets.

Return of the living dead

Speaking of AOL: It’s something of a miracle that the company still exists. In 2000, when it merged with Time Warner, it was valued at $350 billion, and the next year, more than 24 million people in the U.S. were paying for its Internet access service. By the end of last year, that number had dwindled to just 3.3 million subscribers. Here’s a quick recap of some of AOL’s miscues over the years:

• AOL Voicemail ($5.95 per month)
• A teen service called Red (featuring “a talking head—using the image of an actual employee—that uses software to answer users’ questions”)
• A digital music partnership with Burger King
• A reality show called “Gold Rush”
• Social networking site AIM Pages
• Going free
• The hyperlocal Patch blogs

Though AOL was once a high flier, no other company ever liked it quite enough to buy it. Google bought a five-percent, $1 billion stake in AOL in 2005, leading analysts to wonder if Microsoft missed out. That resulted in a $726 million writedown in 2009. Time Warner bought back Google’s stake and finally spun off “the albatross” in December 2009.  AOL is still promising a bounceback. “The executive team expects a profitable content business by next year,” CEO Tim Armstrong said in May 2011.

Yahoo hasn’t fared much better. The company launched Yahoo Platinum in 2003; for $9.95 a month, subscribers got access to audio and videos.  The program was dead by October of that same year. It later tried a Twitter-wannabe microblogging service (“Meme…where you share everything that you find that’s interesting,”). Perhaps the smartest move Yahoo ever made was not buying AOL.

Where did these companies go wrong? In 2010, former Time Warner CEO Gerald Levin pondered that question in an interview with the New York Times . The AOL-Time Warner deal was “undone by the Internet itself,” he said. “I think it’s something that no one could have foreseen, and to this day, whether Apple is going to dominate entertainment or whether Amazon is going to dominate publishing, all the old business plans are out the window. How do you get paid for content?”

Know what’s cool? A billion dollars

In 2006, an RBC Capital analyst estimated that a certain social networking company would be worth $15 billion in a few years, based on “raw, unprecedented user/usage growth.”

Six years later, Facebook went public with a valuation of $104 billion. Too bad the analyst wasn’t talking about Facebook but about MySpace. The social networking company that Rupert Murdoch acquired for $580 million in 2005 sold for just $35 million in 2011.

Why did Facebook soar while MySpace — and other social networking services like Friendster — sank? It allowed people to build real connections using their actual personal information, and rolled out a product that was ready to scale and had good technology. Other companies realized sharing was important too — in 2005, Yahoo SVP Jeff Weiner called sharing “the next chapter of the World Wide Web” — but Facebook was able to implement it in a way that kept users coming back. The site surpassed Yahoo and AOL for “stickiness” in 2009, when Nielsen found users spending an average of four hours and thirty-nine minutes a month on Facebook.

Social has already disrupted some industries — witness the rise of Twitter and the way it has changed the way news is reported, with stories like Osama Bin Laden’s assassination breaking there first. In a sign of the importance of these emerging platforms, newspapers like the Wall Street Journal and New York Times are launching “Everywhere” initiatives to deliver news to readers where they are already hanging out.

Fast food and music don’t mix

Hard to believe it now, but there was real skepticism that iTunes’ 99-cent songs would be able to compete with peer-to-peer file-sharing services. “According to academics who’ve studied the economics of digital music distribution,” we wrote in 2003, the year iTunes launched, “the cost still seems too high to attract users of peer-to-peer file trading services.” The piece cited an economist who believed “the appropriate price of a downloaded song is 18 cents.” In fact, Real Networks dropped its song prices to $0.49 in an attempt to compete against Apple.

In the end, consumers choose selection and convenience over P2P networks. We called iTunes “a kickstart for the micropayments industry.” Was it? While Steve Jobs said in 2004 that Apple wouldn’t hit its one-year, 100 million songs downloaded goal, global digital music sales crossed $1.1 billion in 2006. In April 2008, Apple surpassed Walmart  as the largest music seller in the United States.

The company that arguably started the digital music revolution — Napster — didn’t survive. Once it no longer offered “free,” it was done, though it tried to reincarnate itself: launching a mobile music service, “Napster To Go,” with AT&T in 2004 (the one smartphone that supported it could hold up to 6 songs), partnering with Circuit City on a digital music store, getting itself acquired by Best Buy in 2008 ,and then being bought back by Rhapsody in 2011. Unfortunately, Rhapsody was already losing out to newer (and free) streaming services like Pandora and Spotify.

The partnerships with Circuit City and Best Buy, though, were probably the kiss of death. One of the big trends of the past 10 years has been brick-and-mortar retail stores’ consistent failure to compete effectively against digital-native companies. Best Buy wasn’t the only retailer to try to crack the digital-content business — and fail: Target and Sears both took a shot. And McDonald’s sold digital content over its WiFi network and even tried DVD rentals in its restaurants.

Do you like the feel of paper?

Just as digital music didn’t really take off until Apple introduced the iPod, the ebook revolution didn’t take place until the arrival of the Kindle. In paidContent’s early years, ebooks were written off as a failure in part because publishers couldn’t figure out what to do with DRM. (In 2003, “temporary electronic ink” that would disappear after a few months was floated as a possible solution.) Barnes & Noble decided to stop selling ebooks in 2003, and Yahoo stopped selling them in 2004.

Meanwhile, Amazon and Google were pushing forward. Google launched Google Print – now called Google Book Search, and still besieged by lawsuits seven years later. Amazon tested two now-defunct programs: Amazon Pages, which allowed customers to buy access to digital copies of select pages from books, and Amazon Upgrade, which bundled print books with online access to the complete work.

Customers weren’t biting. Then Amazon came out with the Kindle in 2007 for $399. Less than two years later, Amazon was selling more Kindle books than print books, and ebooks now make up over 20 percent of some big-six publishers’ sales. Barnes & Noble has had some success with its Nook e-reader and digital bookstore, but bankrupt Borders shuttered all its stores in 2011. Meanwhile, the Department of Justice suit against Apple and five big publishers for allegedly colluding to set e-book prices drags on.

Good thing Steve Jobs looked beyond ringtones

A Forbes survey back in 2002 found that “business professionals” would be willing to pay for “news content to be delivered to their cellular devices,” and some media companies tried early mobile experiments. Verizon offered a cell phone version of the Yellow Pages — which, at $19.95 per year, gained 15,000 subscribers in three months. But starting in 2004, everyone decided the future was in ringtones. A $4 billion global business by the end of the year, one company projected.

So, so many ringtones. You could buy them from Rolling Stone or from an ATM-like device called E2Go. A fall 2004 marketing campaign let you mix your own ringtones on Levi’s website. Billboard launched a top ringtones chart.

Could ringtones “prove to be a passing fad”? we wondered late in 2004. Luckily, yes — a new technology came along to shake up the mobile market. No, it wasn’t the $500 ESPN phone, but the iPhone, which came out in 2007. And by opening its platform up to third-party app developers, Apple got users ready for its next ecosystem-changing device, the iPad, in 2010.

Monetizing mobile

Advertising has always been a fuzzy business — how exactly do you measure engagement and success? Well, that’s still the big debate about advertising in the digital era.  ”If here’s anything that’s really holding back ad spending on the web, it’s the lack of good measurements,” Tim Armstrong, then Google’s VP of national sales, said in 2007.

Mobile advertising has also faced obstacles. In 2006, mobile carriers began allowing advertising despite fears of annoying customers. Customers were indeed annoyed – 79 percent of them found mobile advertising annoying, according to a 2007 Forrester study — but they could “see the potential benefits of mobile advertising and marketing to themselves,” particularly if they could get a useful special offer or coupon.

Further complicating matters for advertisers: The smartphone market is fragmented among different brands — marketers don’t want to spend the money to create different ads for Android and iOS — and there are two mobile ad universes: mobile browser and apps.

Nevertheless, mobile advertising has gained ground, crossing  $1 billion in the U.S. for the first time in 2011, according to the Interactive Advertising Bureau, totaling $1.6 billion for the year.

The next opportunity is social media advertising. And once again, it will be a challenge to figure out some standardized metrics. What’s a retweet worth, anyways?

Back to where we all began

Though micropayments worked well for music when Apple launched iTunes, the path to payments for written content has been rockier. In 2004, we wrote that “micropayments today are still characterized by a large number of competing transaction types” – including direct-to-bill, merchant aggregation, prepaid accounts and direct transfer – and “each of these face the current incumbent in digital content distribution: the flat-fee subscription model.”

Eight years later, it appears that the subscription model has won out. The iPad opened the door for magazine and newspaper publishers to create new revenue selling content on that platform, but the results have been mixed. When Rupert Murdoch’s “The Daily” iPad newspaper launched in early 2011, the company called it “the model for how stories are told and consumed.” We wrote, “The bet here is that while consumers are less and less likely to reach into their pocket for a few quarters to buy a newspaper, they might not care about the 14 cents on their credit card for a copy of an e-newspaper.” A year and a half later, The Daily has over 100,000 paying subscribers — but it’s living on borrowed time and may not get through the five years its publisher has said it needs to break even.

Writing for the web, of course, has been around for awhile. At the beginning of the decade, blogging was called “nanopublishing,” and the question was how blogs could support themselves doing it. All sorts of models have arisen. For example, Gawker tried a licensing deal with Yahoo, but that relationship ended a year later. The deal “garnered way more attention than we expected, but less traffic,” Gawker CEO Nick Denton said in 2006.

Some bloggers have stayed independent and make a living from advertising (or from their day job); others write their blogs under a newspaper, website or larger magazine’s umbrella — see the Dish’s Andrew Sullivan, FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver, WaPo’s Ezra Klein. Or, they go to work for the Huffington Post!

Magazine companies have grappled with whether to bundle digital editions with print subscriptions or charge for them separately. Time Inc. — which first put digital editions of its magazines behind AOL’s paywall in 2003 — started out charging separately, but today Time Inc. and Condé Nast print subscribers get the digital edition free. Hearst, meanwhile, is charging separately, and it said its digital business in the U.S. became “solidly profitable” for the first time in 2011.

Could there ever be a Netflix for magazines? Time tried it for print versions with its 2008 Maghound service. It failed, due to a lack of marketing and reader interest. Magazine publishers are trying again with joint venture Next Issue Media.

Many newspaper publishers, most notably the New York Times, tried paywalls at the start of the decade and then abandoned them – only to return to the model in the past couple years.  In its most recent earnings report, the NYT said it has 454,000 digital subscribers. Is that enough to sustain the newspaper in its 21st-century transition?  Probably the best answer to that came from  Vivian Schiller. But it was in response not to the NYT’s recent digital subscriber numbers, but to the NYT’s decision in 2004 to close the paper’s first paywall, known as TimesSelect. Schiller, then the SVP and general manager of NYTimes.com, was asked whether TimesSelect had worked.  “It did work,” she said. “It’s just a matter of as compared to what.”

Birthday cake photo courtesy of Shutterstock user [Robyn Mackenzie].

TV photo courtesy of Shutterstock user [Somchai Buddha].

Zombie hand photo courtesy of Shutterstock user [lineartestpilot].

Piggybank photo courtesy of Shutterstock user [cardiae]

Fast food photo courtesy of Shutterstock user [Sergio Martinez].

Book photo courtesy of Shutterstock user [TrotzOlga].

Ringtones and apps photo courtesy of Shutterstock user [violetkaipa].

Cash register photo courtesy of Shutterstock user [titelio].

Magazines photo courtesy of Shutterstock user [bernashafo].

Next Issue’s expansion to iPad is its first real chance at widespread adoption. The company started up back in 2009, when Condé Nast, Hearst, Meredith, News Corp and Time Inc. teamed up to create a cross-platform digital newsstand — but there were no visible results until the launch of a digital storefront “preview” on the Samsung Galaxy tablet in May 2011. The launch for Android 3.0 (Honeycomb) and above in April 2012 was a small step forward, but few people owned the right tablet.

With Next Issue’s launch on iPad, there’s a better opportunity to see whether readers are interested in all-you-can-read tablet magazines for a flat monthly fee. Thirty-nine popular titles are available now (full list below), with more expected later this year. Subscribers can choose an “unlimited basic” subscription for $9.99 per month, which gives them access to all monthly and biweekly titles, or an “unlimited premium” subscription for $14.99 per month, which adds weeklies like Time and the New Yorker to the mix. They can also purchase individual magazine subscriptions, ranging in price from $1.99 to $5.99 per month, and individual magazine issues, ranging in price from $2.49 to $5.99 per issue. There are free 30-day trials for both unlimited basic and premium subscriptions.

If a user already subscribes to a certain title, he or she can read that digital edition from within the app for free “or a nominal cost,” depending on whether the publisher bundles print and digital editions (as Time Inc., Condé Nast and Meredith do) or charges separately for digital editions (as Hearst does).

“GQ” magazine in carousel view

Is it a good deal?

Next Issue’s app looks great on both Android and iPad, and its availability on iPad opens it up to many more magazine lovers. But will they find unlimited subscriptions worth the fee? It probably depends on how much they’re paying for magazine subscriptions now, whether they’re willing to shift the money they’re paying from print to digital, how much they value a print subscription, how much they want to read popular magazines in general versus specific titles, and whether Next Issue has the titles they want. (As my colleague Mathew Ingram notes, this is also not the platform for people who prefer a Flipboard-style, social-based method of reading content.)

A personal example: My household subscribes to the print versions of New Yorker, Bon Appetit, Real Simple, Martha Stewart Living and the Economist. The total annual cost we pay for those magazines (using the prices listed on the magazine website, and assuming no discounts for multi-year subscriptions or other special offers) is $256.98, or about $21 a month. So an “unlimited premium” Next Issue Media subscription should be a bargain for us at $14.99 a month — except it doesn’t include print issues and two of the magazines we subscribe to, Martha Stewart Living and the Economist, aren’t available, at least for now.

As Next Issue adds more magazines, though — CEO Morgan Guenther tells me that the company plans to double the number of titles it offers this year — it becomes a better deal, and dropping print subscriptions becomes more enticing. In 2013, Next Issue will add its first “outside publisher” titles — i.e., magazines not published by the five companies already participating in the JV — in “key segments.” (That could include magazines like The Economist and Consumer Reports.) The company also plans to expand to some international markets, add search and social features, add some advertising and expand to newspapers (at which point titles from News Corp, the fifth partner in the JV, will become available).

The list of magazines available now, by publisher

*=weekly magazine only included in premium subscription package

Condé Nast

• Allure
• Bon Appétit
• Brides
• Condé Nast Traveler
• Glamour
• Golf Digest
• GQ
• The New Yorker*
• Self
• Vanity Fair
• Vogue
• Wired

Hearst

• Car and Driver
• Elle
• Esquire
• Popular Mechanics

Meredith

• Better Homes and Gardens
• Fitness
• Parents

Time

• All You
• Coastal Living
• Cooking Light
• Entertainment Weekly
• Essence
• Fortune
• Golf
• Health
• InStyle
• Money
• People*
• People en Español
• People StyleWatch
• Real Simple
• Southern Living
• Sports Illustrated*
• Sports Illustrated Kids
• Sunset
• This Old House
• Time*

Social sharing is bound to become more valuable than print distribution, Quittner said. “The newsstand business is a horrible business. Magazines pay something like 50 percent of their costs of distribution to newsstands, and then if they sell 20 to 30 percent of their magazines, that’s considered a home run. Then they have to pay to kill — to destroy — the 30 to 40 percent of the magaines they don’t sell. It’s a really ugly, uneconomical business that is probably not long for the world.”

The Daily editor-in-chief Jesse Angelo said “we always wanted to be a subscription product, with paid ads” and said that “when we talk about apps, it drives thousands and thousands of downloads to the Apple Store. There’s beginning to be a re-creation of the original Web link economy in apps.”

As for paid content, many Flipboard publishers are asking for paywall support, Quittner said. “People will pay for ‘essential’ — the WSJ, the NYT, and the Daily,” he said. Flipboard hasn’t introduced a paywall option yet, but “we have to create systems that allow for the most engaged users to pay for that which they think is essential.”

“Advertisers want much more integration with content,” Angelo said. “They want to sponsor a page, or to have content that’s ‘brought to you by’.”

The Daily won’t do pre-roll advertising, Angelo said: “Short of a video of the president getting shot, I’m sorry, I’m not waiting through your pre-roll for anything. But post-roll, or ‘best video of the day as brought to you by Canon SureShot’ or something — that sort of thing is much more on the rise.”

Digital magazines could take one cue from print

“My tech fantasy is that within the next couple years, smartphones and tablets will have external-facing screens” so readers can show others what they are reading, Quittner said. “It’s a huge social signal. Right now we can’t do that. We’re all in our own little content silos.”

Image from Livestream

Condé Nast, Hearst, Meredith, News Corp and Time Inc. joined to launch Next Issue Media back in 2009 to sell digital magazines and other content from one cross-platform digital newsstand. But rollout has been slow, with little visible action since the company launched a digital storefront “preview” on the Samsung Galaxy tablet last May.

Now Next Issue Media launches for Android 3.0 and above with 32 popular magazines available. The company expects to add more later this year, eventually getting up to about 75 titles. The titles available are “premium, mass-market titles,” CEO Morgan Guenther told paidContent. “We’re taking a big, fat, short-tail content approach to this and going where the readers are.” Instead of downloading separate magazine apps, users download the Next Issue Media app and can read all the magazines within it.

The most innovative part of the launch is the “all-you-can-read” plan. Users can pay $9.99 per month for unlimited access to monthly and bi-weekly magazines, or $14.99 per month for monthlies and weeklies. Those prices include access to back issues — but the back catalog starts from January 1, 2012, so readers won’t see content from before that.

But will you be able to use it?

The cloud-based app only works with an Internet connection, though users can save individual issues to their device to read them offline. There are no social networking or sharing features yet, though Guenther said those are planned.

For now the biggest limitation is platform. Guenther said Next Issue will submit an iPad app to Apple “within an eight-week window” but it’s unclear how long the approval process will take. And because Kindle Fire runs a forked version of Android 2.3, it isn’t compatible with the Next Issue app.

A magazine-shaped promo piece stacked in the publication bins but with none of the publishers’ content inside. Instead, the company played up its tablet editions and their cross-device access by offering them all free of charge at CES for download to iPad, Kindle Fire, Nook Tablet/Nook Color and Android devices via NextIssue. (You can try it this weekend; the free trial ends Sunday night.)

A magazine-shaped promo piece stacked in the publication bins but with none of the publishers’ content inside. Instead, the company played up its tablet editions and their cross-device, all-in-one subscription access by offering them all free of charge at CES for download to iPad, Kindle Fire, Nook Tablet/Nook Color and Android devices via NextIssue. (You can try it this weekend; the free trial ends Sunday night.) The downloaded issues will be accessible on devices after the promo ends.

I wasn’t at CES but I heard about this when I was working on another story and it caught my attention. Instead of handling out cards for one free download or sticking with a single title or device, the company tried something that matches the best of its digital intentions: getting attention for its tablet strategy, while showing the device makers it can be a good partner and stressing an ecumenical approach at the same time.

A spokesperson says “thousands” of people have used the code but wouldn’t give it a range; the most popular title is the one that usually includes the most tech coverage, Time.

Time Inc. isn’t alone in trying to get this kind of attention for its mass of tablet mags. Conde Nast, for instance, has been highlighted on the Kindle Fire since launch with 90-day free trials of its titles in a promo play aimed at getting subscribers from new device owners. Time Inc. is also trying a more traditional promo play with a digital twist with its new Nook deal: subscribe to People on the Nook for a year at $9.99 a month and get a Nook Tablet free.

The promotion will run through March 9. The NYT’s Media Decoder, which announced the news ahead of the official Barnes & Noble (NYSE: BKS) announcements (here and here), reports:

The Nook edition of People is $9.99 a month; with a one-year subscription, customers will receive a Nook Tablet, a color device with a 7-inch display, for $199, a discount from its regular price of $249. Customers who buy a one-year subscription for the Nook edition of The New York Times for $19.99 a month, which includes access to NYTimes.com (NYSE: NYT), will receive a black-and-white Nook Simple Touch free or a Nook Color for $99.

The Nook Tablet is discounted by only $50, but that brings it down to the price of the Kindle Fire. The Nook Color is heavily discounted, by $100. The Nook Simple Touch is normally $99. The total cost of a one-year People subscription on Nook is $119.88, and the total cost of a one-year NYT subscription on Nook is $239.88.

Barnes & Noble announced last week that it may spin off its Nook business, though CEO William Lynch said in a CNBC (NSDQ: CMCSA) interview that B&N stores and Nook would “continue to have a very symbiotic relationship.” This promotion is intended to showcase Nook Newsstand, which Barnes & Noble sees as one of the fastest growing parts of the Nook business.

More significantly, the promotion opens the door for other retailers–ahem, Amazon–to start offering free or discounted e-readers or tablets with content subscriptions. Nothing was preventing Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN) from doing that before, of course, but I would not be surprised to see it respond now with an offer of its own for Kindle Fire Newsstand subscribers.

It is our understanding that Time Inc. (NYSE: TWX) and Barnes & Noble are sharing the cost of the discounted Nook Tablet that comes with the Nook People subscription. The New York Times says it is “not divulging terms of our agreement with Barnes and Noble.”

Not too long ago, TV Everywhere was a bold concept being evangelized by Time Warner (NYSE: TWX) CEO Jeff Bewkes: subscribers would pay once for programming on cable or satellite, then have access to that content across platforms and devices. It provided a potential solution for multichannel operators frustrated by programmers sharing their content for free digitally with consumers directly and for programmers looking for leverage with digital rights and access, and could be a valuable anti-cord cutting tool.

Bewkes offered Time Warner’s own premium HBO, available only as pay TV through cable, satellite or telecom, as an example of how it would work. Subscribers who paid for HBO on, say, Comcast (NSDQ: CMCSA), would have access to HBO Go via authentication. It worked beautifully, offering instant online subscription video on demand (SVOD) of current shows, The Sopranos, The Wire and more while expanding the potential value for subscribers by untethering it from the TV. The catch?

Subscribers have no control over access. It only worked as long as Time Warner and Comcast or other pay TV distributors could agree on terms. It took two years for HBO to be available to the bulk of its pay TV subs via authentication on computer or portable devices; major holdouts Time Warner Cable (NYSE: TWC) and Cablevision (NYSE: CVC) only signed on as 2011 came to a close. That came after TWC and Cablevision added a twist — asserting that the channels they traditionally provided through TV could be available on any screen through an in-house network.

Pay TV isn’t alone. On the video side, Netflix (NSDQ: NFLX), Hulu, Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) iTunes and others expanded from computer access to over-the-top boxes, gaming consoles like Xbox, tablets and smartphones — and through some of those or connected TVs, to TV sets. At Conde Nast, Time Inc. and some other magazine publishers, print and digital only-only subs get full access for one subscription. The New York Times offers options at different costs for different kinds of digital access but home delivery customers get it all included; other newspapers have their own variations.

It’s not exactly the content nirvana offered up by Qwest in its prescient ads about being able to offer every movie, book or musical performance ever produced to a customer at an off-the-beaten-path cafe or a middle-of-nowhere motel (as long as the business had an efficient broadband provider). But it is the beginning of a new age of ubiquity for people willing to pay for content — and scarcity for people who don’t pay directly.

Yes, it sounds a little off base to describe anything digital in terms of scarcity. The usual argument against charging for access is the consumer can get news, info and entertainment from a lot of sources and will turn to those rather than pay a fee. It’s a fair argument and one that rings true in a lot of cases, enabled for years by a traditional media strategy that untethered the print-video dual revenue stream of subscription/licensing and advertising for online distribution and by new digital-only ad-supported outlets. The expectation created was this kind of content would or should be free online. Most of today’s pay efforts are based on balancing that consumer expectation with the reality that online advertising alone can’t replace the disappearing dollars on the traditional side.

We are looking at a different kind of ubiquity and scarcity in digital content today, one that operates almost like pay TV and broadcast. Pay and you get access. Want it for free? Access may be delayed and some content won’t be available at all. Through last season, if you wanted to watch Glee after it aired on Fox (NSDQ: NWS) — a broadcast network — the new episode was online in 24 hours at Hulu or Fox and usually the five most recently aired episodes were available. Starting with the 2011-12 season, unless you subscribe to Hulu Plus or a multichannel provider that has a deal with Fox, you have to wait 8 days. By the way, the only way to get Hulu anywhere but a computer is to subscribe to Hulu Plus for $7.99 a month; basic Hulu is online only.

It also creates some of the same barriers as premium and pay TV. Some were in on Sex and the City or The Sopranos from the beginning; others didn’t meet Carrie or Tony til syndication. For the past few years, some of those barriers have been lowered as networks experimented with digital access. Now they’re going back up. Expect more networks to follow the Fox approach.

The app explosion opened new options. Papers like The Guardian that espoused free online access were willing to charge for app downloads and now, for app subscriptions. Apps became a new revenue stream — potential for some, very real for others — and added a new quandary. Should subscribers have access across every new platform and device for one fee or pay separately?

That’s particularly important when you consider that the cost of developing and deploying new apps can run into serious money for some publishers. Distribution has costs, too. Publishers who want to take advantage of the built-in sales base for iTunes and others have to pay for it with a share of the fee, usually 30 percent. They also give up some or all control over the customer relationship unless the subscription comes through the publisher outside of the app.

News Corp.’s tablet tabloid The Daily went for browser scarcity, charging for full access via iPad app. The same company’s New York Post blocks browser access on the iPad, requiring a paid app, but is open online for now. The Post is trying to keep apps as a separate pay space; its 52-week $273 “digital bundle” includes only the print subscription and the replica e-edition. (App subs get the first 30 days for $1.99, then it’s $9.99 a month or $99 a year.) The New York Times now includes full online access with subscriptions to its Kindle and Nook editions but its digital subscription access doesn’t include the Kindle newsstand, which is operated by Amazon. Freemium Spotify is only free online; the premium part covers mobile access.

The Boston Globe solved a lot of this in one fell swoop by designing its new subscription-only bostonglobe.com with HTML5, rendering it easy to read in any browser on any device. Boston.com is still free but gaining access to the full print and online content from the Globe takes a subscription to the new site.

There’s not an easy answer, especially when “everything everywhere” is a mantra.

As a subscription addict, I’m all for ubiquitous access. More than that, I expect it — and as a traveler who uses a mix of ways to read and watch, I need it. I’ve been separated from my home video subscriptions for 10 weeks now (broken Slingbox connection doesn’t help) and paying for a lot that I literally can’t see is frustrating. I know I’m an extreme case, though, both in my willingness to pay for multiple subscriptions and in my access requirements. I look to family and friends who are far less extreme though and I see a growing expectation that access to content, especially the kind you pay for, will be ubiquitous.

That doesn’t discount new platforms and devices as revenue streams. Each opens new opportunities for subscribtions or for one-off sales/rentals.streams/downloads. That does’t make it cost effective for every publisher to develop something new and device-centric, which either means doing without or accepting that some access will come at the expense of creativity. In the old days we called that shovelware; today’s more sophisticated development environment offers some better options.

In an iPad tablet world, it was easier to put off some of these decisions. But despite iPad’s continued dominance, choice is increasing as is Android’s market share. Millions of Kindle Fires are in use now plus Nook tablets, Samsung Galaxy, and more. Each OS has its issues but content publishers and creators have one that overrides them all: the need not to be left behind when a consumer switches devices.

That’s where “pay once, get it anywhere” should pay off.

Read the rest of the posts in our Coming in 2012 archives.