Maghound, Time Inc.’s new magazine subscription service, is not a “Netflix for magazines.” But it still has potential.

When an industry sees apocalypse on the horizon, saviors are created almost as quickly and fervently as scapegoats. This month, Time Inc. is trying to usher in the magazine industry’s Messianic age. On Monday of last week, it beta-launched Maghound, its attempt to give users more control over their subscriptions by centralizing them all on the Web. Users pay a fixed monthly rate that earns them a set number of subscriptions, but they can opt in and out of the subscriptions at will. Does every new Fortune bring you an I’ll-never-have-the-time-to-read-this burden? Then take a break and subscribe to Entertainment Weekly for a more lighthearted breather. Yes, you can swap magazines even if they’re run by different companies as long as they’re registered with Maghound.

Maghound has widely been touted as the magazine industry’s stab at the Netflix business model. Countless press articles have implied that Maghound will do for subscriptions what the little red envelope has done for DVD rentals. Googling “Netflix for magazines” yields dozens of news articles about the ‘Hound. “Will the Netflix Model Work for Mag Subscriptions?” Ad Age asks. PaidContent calls it “The Netflix Hope.”

Maghound, though, isn’t explicitly purporting to be the industry’s golden ticket. When The Big Money asked its president, Dave Ventresca, whether Maghound thinks of itself as a Netflix-ish company, Ventresca said you’ll never hear anybody make that comparison in the Maghound office. Maghound seems to know it has few similarities to Netflix, and if it succeeds in revitalizing the stalled magazine industry—no sure bet—it will be because of its own ingenuity, not Netflix’s.