Apple is preparing to relaunch Texture, a news subscription app it acquired in March, as a premium tier of Apple News early next year, according to a Bloomberg report. To prepare for the launch, Apple has been trying to get prominent newspapers including the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal to come on board.
However, Apple’s advances have been met with hesitation by the industry, according to Bloomberg. One of the concerns is that Apple’s flat pricing model may undercut publishers’ own online subscription efforts, effectively luring paying audiences away from the Times and others.
Apple didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
Texture currently offers unlimited access to some 200 magazines, including Vanity Fair, GQ and Wired, for $9.99 a month. The app presents articles in a look similar to that of the original magazine, promising subscribers to read magazines “cover to cover.”
Apple is expected to break with that look, and instead present articles in a more online-like layout, according to Bloomberg. The company is also looking to integrate the service directly into Apple News, effectively distributing it to hundreds of millions of iPhones and iPads.
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Apple isn’t the first company looking to build a kind of Netflix for news. Other contenders include Magzter as well as Scribd. The latter, which started out as a document hosting service, recently partnered with the New York Times on a joint subscription bundle for $13 a month.
