This video is a must-see, if you’re involved in new media:

The video is a collaboration between Adobe and Wired and tries to look a year or two into the future and see where magazines are going.

The presentation is not a animated demo – it’s a live demo, built with Adobe InDesign.

“We are entering a new era of media, where we finally have a digital platform that allows us to retain all the rich visual features of high-gloss print, from lavish design to glorious photography, while augmenting it with video, animations, additional content and full interactivity,” says Wired’s Chris Anderson. “We’re one of the first magazines to go beyond the concept stage with this, and the demo we showed at TED and in the above video reflects months of real tablet production as we prepare to go live this summer.”

It’s a fascinating demo and it raises several issues that we’re going to see fought out over the next couple of years:

• Flash vs HTML
• Fixed magazine-style layouts, vs flowing Web-style layouts
• The idea of periodicals vs 24/7 constantly updated information

It’s not too hard to see that Wired as a print magazine is going to be history within a few years. Wired readers are going to eat this interactive stuff up and be the first adopters for devices like the iPad.

I’m not convinced, though, that the benefits of slickly designed monthly digital magazine are going to enough to save the idea of a Wired magazine.

If you’re reading a Wired magazine article on your tablet computer, you’re going to want to be able to comment on it, see what other people have said about it, see the articles that other people like you are talking about on Twitter, post your video responses to the article and view the video embedded in the article on your TV.

In other words – the idea of a “magazine” is going to be blown apart by cheap tablet computers – and it needs to be blown apart and reassembled in a new way if it has any chance of surviving.

Check out the video and let me know what think about Adobe + Wired’s concept for the future of magazines!