Time Inc’s long-in-development magazine subscription website Maghound, which borrows concepts heavily from Netflix (NSDQ: NFLX), is slated to launch this September...this comes after four years (yes!) of continuous development and testing, according to Dave Ventresca, president of Maghound Enterprises, who spoke at an industry conference this week and explained the concept, reports Folio. Currently about 280 titles are on board, an plans to have about 100 more through this year.

The service will be a flat-rate magazine subscription site, where uses pay a monthly fee, and have access to these magazine on a per-copy basis, instead of being locked into a yearly subscription. Users will have the ability to switch titles at any time and can cancel whenever they wish.

The pricing: three titles for $3.95 per month; five titles for $7.95; seven titles for $9.95, and $1 per title for eight titles or more. Then titles that have a non-discounted traditional sub rate of around $19 or more per year are considered “premium” titles and will have an extra $2 fee per month..which means the likes of Economist, The Atlantic, New Yorker and and others would cost more...and surely will inhibit some of the potential growth. But thankfully, Maghound will retain complete rights to member names in order to keep customers from getting saturated with direct mail and e-mails from multiple publishers at the same time, the story says.

Will it work? This is probably an idea at least 5-7 years behind its time...the mass market that would have paid for this has already left the station a long time ago. For niche magazines, which tend to be premium priced, this would prove to be a bit too expensive.