These days, magazine publishers must have their content available on apps, iPads, mobile devices, and whatever comes next just to stay competitive.

For a special episode of Media Beat, we spoke with execs from two companies leading that movement. First up is  Doug Carlson, who went from founding Fiji Water to becoming managing director of Zinio, one of the first companies to take magazines online.

“What we’ve done is created the ability to take a file from a publisher and basically normalize it to a whole bunch of different devices and operating systems, and that’s really in the end what we call unity,” he told mediabistro.com founder Laurel Touby. “Basically, it doesn’t matter what device you have. You buy your content once, and you can get it on any one of those platforms.”

Part 2: ScrollMotion’s John Lema Brings Esquire to The iPad

Part 3: How To Create a Magazine iPad App