Looks like we called it: citing “sources familiar with the companies’ plans” All Things Digital reports that The Daily, the joint venture between Apple and News Corp. for an iPad-exclusive newspaper, won’t be announced next week:
Apple and News Corp. have made a joint decision to push back next week’s planned launch, according to sources familiar with the companies’ plans. The delay is supposed to give Apple time to tweak its new subscription service for publications sold through its iTunes platform.
Plans to hold debut the iPad newspaper at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art next Wednesday have been tabled “for weeks, not months,” I’m told.
As we expected, the issue seems to be lying in app subscriptions for iTunes, which aren’t ready at the moment. And with such a feature supposedly being scheduled to ship with a software update to iOS, it appears that we’ll have to wait for weeks before actually reading The Daily. iOS 4.3, in fact, was released as “beta 1” only yesterday.
News Corp. PR confirmed the delay, and Apple declined to comment. Apple is reportedly tweaking the iTunes subscription feature that will allow publishers to push new content to users automatically, with recurring billing in iTunes.
