Future releases live-updating royal baby app

Future is intending to be the first publisher to sell an app which includes a picture of the royal baby.

The magazine publisher has released a Royal Baby app to the App Store, which can be downloaded to iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch, and will automatically update to include pictures of the royal baby.

A free sample app plus four chapters, each charged at £0.69, are now available and four more will be released after the birth.

The app updates by taking a curated feed of content from the Press Association, including pictures, interviews, profiles and features.

Royal Baby is the second live-updating app created in an ongoing partnership between Future and PA. Football Week was released in January, which is published on a Friday and updates with football scores as they become available over the weekend.

Unlike Football Week, Royal Baby is not on Newsstand, as it is a one-off rather that a weekly or monthly edition that people can subscribe to, but content will be added based on feedback and the type of content that proves popular.

The royal baby app also represents a development in Future's "commission once, publish to multiple channels" strategy, Mike Goldmith, editor-in-chief of digital editions as Future, told Journalism.co.uk. The app takes content created by Future's relatively new bookazines department for a royal baby bookazine, a one-off print edition for sale on news stands.

Goldsmith is hoping the app will prove popular not just in the UK. Most of Future's digital sales are to people in the US and he is anticipating international interest in the royal baby will lead to sales of the app globally.

The app has been created using FutureFolio, app creation software that Future makes available to other publishers, which has been developed to include live feeds.

In addition to Football Week and Royal Baby, Future's Gathered by Mollie Makes app, a craft title, also includes a live-updating feed. This takes a feed of content from the associated website rather than from PA. Goldmith, who told us in February that Future was planning more live-updating apps, said today that taking live feeds is some thing that will "become a matter of course" for Future.

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