Subsidised e-readers key to Skiff strategy

Sara Ver-Bruggen - 04 Mar 2010

The first e-reading venture developed for the newspaper and magazine industries will likely commercialise its e-reader as part of subsidised subscription deals with publishing partners.

The Hearst-financed venture Skiff continues to conduct 'pricing research' with consumers, both for its proprietary e-reader and the content it will sell through its e-commerce platform. Selling subsidised devices will likely play a big role in the company's strategy, says Kiliaen Van Rensselaer, the company's chief marketing officer.

'Because advertising is such a major source of revenue for newspapers and magazines we want to get to scale very quickly. We will push down the face value price of the e-reader,' says Van Rensselaer.

'There could be great savings for someone who chooses to subscribe to a newspaper, say the Wall Street Journal, through Skiff. They become eligible for our e-reader at a reduced cost,' explains Van Rensselaer.

Some early e-reader rollouts by European newspaper publishers - including Les Echos in France - adopted similar models, bundling subsidised e-readers with subscriptions.

'We have conducted trials outside the US,' says Van Rensselaer. He adds: 'Many newspapers are looking to manage down their print and distribution costs.'

In the next 4-6 weeks Skiff plans to announce publishing as well as OEM partners and investors.

When Skiff was set up three years ago (as a venture initially named FirstPaper), a big focus was on developing an e-reader. Since then the company has invested considerably into developing a software and e-commerce platform aimed at newspaper and magazine publishers that will work across mobile devices including smartphones, e-readers and tablets.

'Skiff content will be reminiscent of print versions of newspapers. Advertising can be dynamically inserted. Depending on the device, ads can be "hot". For example, on a touchscreen device a ¼ page ad, when touched, can become a full page ad, but in a way so that the newspaper is in the background, perhaps with the masthead still visible. You are not whisked away to the advertiser's website for instance', says Van Rensselaer.

When Skiff does launch later this year, in some cases the application or software will be embedded in a device and in others it could be as part of an 'app store'.

The Skiff e-reader will be thin and based on a flexible display using PVI-E Ink's e-paper frontplane, spin-coated onto a flexible TFT backplane on foil developed by LG Display.