Come on DRF, TT and Bloodhorse- Get Apps!

I got an iPad tonight from my mom as a Chanukah present. I'm pretty excited to see what kind of applications I could get horse racing wise from the iTunes store (I previously had bought iPod apps and those would work on an iPad, but it just wouldn't be as good). When I typed in horse racing into my iTunes I was suprised to find the following.

Trainer Magazine has put up apps for their European and North America editons of the magazine. This got my interest since as far as I know this is the first horse racing magazine to put an app up on iTunes. DRF, Thoroughbred Times and Bloodhorse do not have apps for race fans to view their articles (DRF does have an app, but it's wager caculator and not an app where people can read articles and such). With the publishing intrustry struggling more then ever (especially in horse racing), now might be a good time to put up an app for horse racing fans to download so that they can view an issue at their convience.

With a quick search I found the following main stream magazines/newspapers have iPad apps (focusing on iPad apps for now):

People
Time
Sports Illustrated
(all three magazines owned by Time-Warner)
Newsweek
US Weekly
New York Post
New York Times
USA Today
Wall Street Journal

and many more.

As for Horse Racing apps out there, as I said before DRF has a wagering calculator, the Breeders' Cup put together a wonderful app that I think everybody enjoyed using and there are several games out there. What is holding up DRF, TT and Bloodhorse from putting out their own? I'm not sure, however one thing it could be is money. Because the Apps can only be made in a certin code and only on a Mac, there are a limited amount of app creators out there. These creators have to get updates and fix bugs pretty quickly which takes time, thus costing more then people expect. Both of the Trainer apps do cost money, and you will have to pay per issue. However, from looking at the prices it's 50% less then you would be spending on a hard copy issue.

I'm not saying that you should stop buying hard copy magazines, but iPod/iPhone/iPad applications could help horse racing publications in the long run.