I checked in remotely to the live video of Apple and News Corps’ joint press event, and then took a spin through the app itself. Read on for some quick impressions of The Daily.

The price is right: Despite the name, The Daily won’t be sold by the day. Instead, you can get a week for $1 or a year for $40 — a surprising price point given that News Corps’ Wall Street Journal sells for $17 per month. For further comparison, the New York Times’ upcoming paywall, which will apply to its iPad app, is rumored to cost just south of $20 per month.

The content? Different: Flipping through The Daily’s pages is more like reading a news magazine than a traditional paper. The front pages are flanked by colorful blurbs and infographics instead of text-heavy reportage, and the first edition seems mainly concerned with looking cool, rather than delivering heaps of hard information. But let’s give the editorial some time to grow, shall we?

More flourishes, please: Of course, The Daily has lots of video, but what impressed me more were the occasional animations that added pop to a story, like the image of Cairo’s Tahrir Square that zooms out to show the full scale of the protests. Let’s see more of that, and less boilerplate video.

iPad shows its age: The Daily’s main method of navigation is a carousel of top stories that you can scroll through by swiping, but the frame rate is unbecoming for an iOS device, and it’s too easy to scroll right past the article you’re trying to read. Once you get into each article, it’s like butter once again.

Not entirely offline: The Daily’s text and images download to the iPad for each edition, but switching into airplane mode left videos and audio unavailable. It’d be nice to have video caching as an option if you’re about to get on a plane.

Not completely un-social: Although the tablet app and The Daily’s home page will hide behind a pay wall, individual stories can be shared over the web for free. Sounds like News Corp is figuring out that the delivery, not the content, is what you pay for.

Hiccups: I wouldn’t expect the first tablet-only newspaper to be flawless out of the gate. Images inside the carousel view are hideously compressed, and navigating to each section takes you directly to the top story instead of the table of contents. This wouldn’t be so jarring if you didn’t get a brief glimpse of the section’s own carousel before automatically jumping into an article. Also, too much rotating between portrait and landscape modes crashed the app.

Not just for iPad (eventually): News Corp acknowledged that The Daily will eventually become available for other tablets, but it’s not clear which or when. Motorola’s Xoom is a likely candidate. Smaller tablets might have trouble with the format.

There hasn’t been much in the way of Skiff news since CES, except for the announcement of a partnership to put its reader software on Samsung phones–for instance, the release date and price of the Skiff gadget remain unknown. I still think that open standards like HTML5 will eventually eliminate the need for proprietary technologies designed to make digital reading materials look pretty and approachable. In the short term, though, Skiff has an opportunity–there’s still a need for what it’s doing. Here’s hoping that it’s hard at work on software for the iPad, Android tablets, and Windows–and that it’s the whole ecosystem rather than the E-Ink reader that got News Corp. excited.

If Murdoch was to yank his news sites out of Google’s index, that would only leave…well, all of the world’s news sources except for those owned by Rupert Murdoch. You gotta think that the harm to Google would be minimal, and that the harm to Murdoch’s sites might be considerable. If most of the world uses Google to find stuff–and it does–don’t you want your stuff to be there? Or can you imagine saying to yourself “Hmmm, I want to make sure that the New York Post shows up in my search results–guess I’ll use Bing?”

As a consumer, the notion of search engines cutting deals with content companies to opt in or opt out of certain engines leaves me antsy. If the practice caught on, we’d be left with a scenario in which no search engine could aspire to be comprehensive, and we’d be stuck having to use several engines if we wanted to find everything of value.

Even so, I remain in the apparent small minority of pundits who would like to see Murdoch do something about the supposed relentless persecution of his poor, struggling business by a bullying, thieving Google. If that something involved an alliance with Microsoft, everybody involved would learn a lot, no?

As Staci Kramer of PaidContent points out, it’s not entirely clear what Murdoch is talking about, or even that he knows what he’s talking about. He says this strategy would be similar to what the Wall Street Journal does, but while the Journal does indeed have a pay wall, it actually lowers it for visitors who arrive from Google.

As far as I know, no major media sites are currently actively preventing Google from crawling their content or otherwise trying to prevent the company from helping people find stories and making money along the way. (A half a decade ago, some publishers–including IDG, where I worked at the time–checked to see if visitors were arriving from Google and told ones who were to come back via the home page–but the experiment was futile, self-destructive, and short-lived.)

I’m probably in the the minority among my media-industry peers here–and it may be a minority of one–but I (A) think Murdoch’s plan is a silly, self-defeating idea, and (B) hope that he does indeed put it into action.

Here’s why:

• I’m tired of hearing media executives whine about Google without doing anything about its alleged misconduct. It’s extremely easy to configure a Web site to prevent Google from crawling it. So why don’t these sites that are so nonplussed about being in Google’s index opt out? If Murdoch blocks Google, he’ll at least be safe from charges of inconsistency and/or hypocrisy.
• I’m in favor of multiple business models for content sites. Technologizer is doing fine as a mostly ad-supported enterprise, thank you very much, but the media business will ultimately be healthier if there are multiple potential revenue streams–ads, monthly subscriptions, maybe even pay-per-use for some stuff. You know, kind of like TV. If News Corp. goes through with this, I’ll at least give it credit for experimenting rather than dithering.
• I’m willing to pay for some stuff. Yes, that attitude is colored to some degree by the fact that I’m in the media biz myself, and no, I can’t think offhand of any News Corp. properties I’m dying to shower in money. (I don’t even have a WSJ subscription at the moment.) But I’d rather live in a world in which some consumers get used to paying for some online content than in one in which sites are doomed if they can’t make a go of things based on advertising alone.
• Watching other people gamble is constructive. If the Murdoch paywall flops as spectacularly as most folks think it will, it’ll be a useful confirmation that everybody was right in the first place. If it’s disappointing, but less so than everyone expects, that’s useful information, too. And if it somehow pays off, other media sites can claim they knew it would all along, and rush to imitate the News Corp. approach.

But enough about my reaction to Rupert’s ruminations. You?