We wondered if or when this day would arrive. We’d pick up a Newsweek, flip open to the table of contents, and something to the right would catch our eye: a button. It’s there. We push it. We’d seen pop-up ads before in Newsweek—the analog kind, which require you tug on a tab to make the liquor bottle dance on top of the hotrod. Nothing like this. Ladies and gentlemen, there’s video in my magazine.

Actually, so far, it’s Entertainment Weekly that’s been getting attention for being the first magazine to have video ads in its printed pages, in its upcoming September 15 issue. We don’t read  EW, but maybe we will now. The video will be stored on a paper-thin screen, inserted into a page with a little cut-out window, which hold up to 40 minutes of video. These screens are designed by the firm Americhip, which is also working on digital sound and smell, and are much cooler than what you’ll find here.

Printing is expensive—relatively, anyhow, to maintaining a website. Video insertions, even if sponsored by the advertiser, make the process even more costly. Though Americhip claims this new LCD microtechnology will allow a print reader to download video from the internet and enjoy it in the frame of a page of glossy 40 lb paper, it’s hard to know what the chances are that any magazine will ever invest in these devices for editorial content alone.

In February 2009, Wired, winner of a number of design awards, and which uses elements of the internet for its aesthetic, published “Design Under Constraint,” in which it mused

At Wired, our design team sees this constraint as our daily bread. On every editorial page, we use words and pictures to overcome the particular restrictions of paper and ink: We can’t animate the infographics (yet). We can’t embed video or voice-over (yet). We can’t add sound effects or music (yet). But for all that we can’t do in this static medium, we find enlightenment and wonder in its possibilities.

Not even six months later, Americhip’s entrance into cutting edge print advertising technology  might make these concerns seem superfluous. But before we anticipate a renaissance in magazine design, in which print mags will incorporate more and more elements of their online counterparts, one obstacle remains: costs, which, right now, only an advertiser is able to cover.

The same questions everyone is asking in the media, which we have grown wary of: What will save the newspaper? The magazine? Our question: are they asking to be saved, and will the savior be sound and video, at home on a tactile page, and more innovation that will allow for generations to appreciate what is already known as the “luxury” of print? Is incorporating new technologies in print kitsch, or is it reinvention of the medium itself?

We have no answers for you. We keep hitting play.