Earlier this year Apple made a decision to charge publishers who wanted to offer a subscription the same 30% fee that they charge app developers. This pissed the content industry off since they’d have to forfeit a substantial amount of their revenue over to Apple who was in essence doing nothing but offering their apps in the App Store. Publishers were given until June 30th to comply, and if they didn’t then they risked getting their apps removed. Shortly before that deadline however, Apple had a change of mind, and they let publishers charge their customers using payment system other than iTunes, but the only catch was that they couldn’t link to these alternative payment systems in their apps. We’ll see what happens this fall when iOS 5 launches and with it Newsstand, a new feature that lets you purchase and organize all your periodicals in a folder in much the same way that iBooks works today.
Today The New York Times issued an update to their iOS apps (meaning iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch) that finally lets users subscribe to their content straight from iTunes. We’re not sure if they reached a deal with Apple to forgo the need to pay 30% or what, but it’s a welcome addition for those too lazy to sign up via their computer, create a username and password, and then enter said credentials into their Apple hardware. The pricing is as follows: $15 gets you access to the NYT on your computer and your iPhone, $20 gets you access to the NYT on your computer and your iPad, and if you want the NYT both on your iPhone and iPad it’s going to cost you $35 … which doesn’t make that much sense since the price is the same whether you opt for the iPad/iPhone/web combo or not.
Anyway, like we said earlier, wait until the launch of iOS 5 this fall to see what’s going to be offered in Newsstand. We’re really excited to see what sorts of newspapers and magazines we’ll be able to finally consume digitally.