iPad News Publication 'The Daily' Now Rumored for Mid-January Launch

We've been following News Corp.'s reported tablet-focused news product, The Daily, for some time as the newspaper industry's most significant foray into digital-only publication looking to harness some of the technological capabilities of tablet devices, but have yet to hear firm word on launch details for the publication.

Despite rumors of a December launch, it appears that The Daily's debut will not occur until early next year, possibly due in part to delays on Apple's side as it prepared iOS 4.2 for release pushing back its work on rolling out iOS support for recurring billing and for automatically pushing content from apps like The Daily to users' devices.

All Things Digital now reports that News Corp. is preparing to launch The Daily during the week of January 17th.

News Corp. plans to launch the publication the week of January 17, multiple sources tell me.

The caveat here is that launch plans have moved around a couple of times in the past few months; until recently, lots of folks expected to see this thing in December. But this latest date looks like a much safer bet.

According to reports, The Daily will be published on a daily basis at a subscription rate of 99 cents per week and offer substantial video and multimedia content, "including some kind of 3-D effect that lots of people are very excited about."

The Daily is also expected to be the first application to use Apple's forthcoming recurring billing feature, allowing users' iTunes Store accounts to be automatically charged on a weekly or monthly basis to keep news content flowing to their devices. Other content-focused apps are obviously expected to quickly adopt the feature once it goes live.