Blockbuster Entertainment in the U.K. releases an iPad edition with native design of its brand magazine

While the movie rental retailer Blockbuster at one time had over 4,000 store locations, the company been reduced to a shadow of itself. In the UK, the brand continues and today that entity released a digital version of its brand magazine into the Apple Newsstand.

Blockbuster Magazine is a free app for the iPad which offers free access to the digital version of the custom publishing product to its customers.

The first issue available in the app's library weighs in under 90 MB – kind of an in between size, too small for a truly interactive digital magazine, too large for a replica edition.

In fact, the new app, credited to Unipro, is a natively designed digital magazine, with both portrait and landscape orientations. But because of the way the video is presented, landscape would be the preferred way to read the digital magazine.
As you will see in the video below, the first issue opens with a video. Because it really is a video, rather than an animation, it looks odd in portrait. After the opening one gets a lot of advertising for Blockbuster and just a bit of content, something that I suppose should be expected with a magazine designed to promote the brand.

There is video here, and it is embedded rather than simply linked to outside sources, so viewing the trailers are possible while outside of an Internet connection – I tested this to make sure.

But because the video is embedded, the amount of video is pretty limited. This keeps the file size down, but will disappoint a lot of readers expecting more video from a magazine that is, after all, about the movies.