I love the iPad so much that I can remember where I was and who I was with when Apple announced its new, life changing, publishing industry-saving device. My boss at the time, Steve Price (he's now the MD at iSUBSCRiBE but back then was running the subscriptions department at Dennis Publishing) was treating us all to dinner after a particularly successful Christmas period. That evening’s iPad launch was the main topic of conversation during dinner and in fact one of my colleagues, a particularly entrepreneurial SEO expert, was tapping on his iPhone beneath the table, ignoring his calamari, frantically buying up domain names based on his prediction of the name of Apple’s new tablet: iSlate.com, iSlateMagazines.com, iTablet.co.uk etc were all on his radar. So when the news came through that Steve Jobs had plumped for the blindingly obvious name, iPad, we were all very excited, with the exception of my entrepreneurial colleague.
If this doesn't illustrate how important the iPad is to me, just do a quick Google image search for ‘iPad magazine subscriptions’ and look out for a smug looking guy in a Transformers t-shirt proudly holding aloft an iPad with a MacUser digital edition badly Photoshopped on to its face. That's me. I was lucky enough to get my hands on an iPad before they were available in the UK and I was very keen to tell the rest of the industry about it, so I wrote a blog on how the iPad was going to change publishing. For some reason, that blog post did very well in the Google search engine results, but has gradually slipped down the rankings, however that image which is part of the blog post has remained firmly at the top of the SERPs.
The point I'm trying to make is that I've been using the iPad and iPhone for a long time, and in that time, I've used a lot of apps. So, for that reason, I found it very difficult to choose a favourite. Just like I couldn’t tell you what my favourite movie or book is. I could reel off a top 50 easily.
One of my current favourite apps is the digital reincarnation of one of the most popular magazines of all time, the Radio Times.
The Radio Times DiscoverTV app is a solution to a problem that the print edition once solved very elegantly, and still does to an extent today. It simply helps you to choose what to watch on TV. But with so many options available to us now, including satellite, cable, on-demand, Netflix, LoveFilm, Freeview and YouTube, the minefield that is the TV guide is no longer a pleasure to use. Page after page of listings make it impossible to quickly scan what’s on the box tonight. It used to be easy to choose your nightly viewing with a highlighter, marking up your preferred viewing each day. It was simple, three then four then five channels fit quite nicely on a double page spread.
I don’t watch as much telly as I used to, but I do hate to miss out on the good stuff, so an app that aids in its discoverability is a really attractive proposition to me.
The start-up process of the app is really simple. Registering is easy and straightforward. I love the fact that I can filter out the content I’m not subscribed to – no more wading through pages of shows that I can’t access.
Once you’re into the actual app, you’re presented with today’s choices, which can be filtered using a now staple UI element from the BBC, a spinning wheel – similar to the one used in the BBC iPlayer radio app.
What’s great about this feature is not the spinny wheel, but the curation of the shows on offer into useful and meaningful sections such as ‘10 Best Free’, ‘Films’, ‘Viral Video of the Day’, ‘10 Best on Catch-Up’ and ‘What we’re watching on demand’. It is immediately obvious from these section names and the choice of shows in them that this app is aimed at a younger audience than the print edition and it’s more than likely that the journalists working on the app are younger than those working on the magazine – which, as a sprightly 37 year-old, suits me just fine.
The app has other cool features such as being able to set a reminder for a show, linking out to VOD services such as Netflix and 4OD, search, Discover More – which details the air dates, cast and crew, episode guide and similar shows – and favouriting which lets you highlight the show in the listings section of the app, which means that if it’s part of a series, it’ll always pop-out.
I do think the app is missing a few key ingredients though – there’s no video content for a start, trailers or previews would be a welcome addition. And more customisable sections in ‘Today’s Choices’ would be useful, but I’m just trying to find holes and I don’t think the app suffers too much without these features.
I’m really impressed with how Immediate Media have taken a print title and created a digital equivalent that solves the same problems as its counterpart in an entirely different way. It’s both useful and entertaining and there’s some really impressive technology under the hood, which make me very excited about the direction this type of app can go, and has provided me with the inspiration I needed to take my own apps in a similar direction.
Radio Times DiscoverTV can be downloaded from the App Store.
