The iOS 4.3 update yesterday brought along with it an unexpected bonus in the form of MLB.TV and NBA League pass subscriptions coming to the AppleTV 2G. This addition does a lot to quell the rumors that subscription services would avoid deals with Apple in the future because of the high cost to the content provider that came along with offering their products inside the iOS ecosystem. In fact, it proves that we may not know all there is to know about the way that Apple makes deals with these companies at all.

The debate regarding subscriptions began when the Sony Reader app was rejected by Apple and followed up with a note by Sony explaining that the app was rejected because it didn’t follow the rules regarding subscriptions in place in the App Store guidelines. Sony CEO Steve Haber was quoted in a NYT article shortly thereafter as saying that ‘all purchases would now need to go through Apple’. This was in fact a reference to a long standing and previously minor clause in the app guidelines that states that if you’re going to offer a purchase of a product on your website or elsewhere then you need to make sure that that same product is available in your app for the same price as well.

The side effects of the newly strict adherence to this clause was what got people up in arms. Apple takes a 30% cut of every in-app purchase on the App Store, which many app developers are currently circumventing by offering their purchases in Mobile Safari instead. The biggest example of this is Amazon, whose app still pushes you out to the browser to make purchases and then allows you to download those purchases inside the app. The ‘new rules’ application of this clause would mean that Amazon, along with Sony and any other subscribers, would be forced to send a 30% chunk of their profits along to Apple, effectively removing their ability to do business on iOS as that’s pretty much every penny someone like Amazon makes on a sale.

This new view of the rules also affected subscriptions in addition to one-time purchases and came just as News Corp’s The Daily, a fully staffed iPad only newspaper, was launching on the iOS platform. Understandably intense debate was sparked about whether subscribers could afford to make that deal and continue to offer products on iOS at all. Doom and gloom were prophesied for the future of subscription platforms like Netflix and Hulu, with many saying that the iOS platforms media consumption options would be heavily limited by the reluctance of those companies to hand over 30% of all new subscriptions gained on the devices themselves.

I have long been of the mind that there is another layer of negotiation and perhaps concession here. Netflix for instance has a nice deep integration into the AppleTV platform as well as recently improved iOS applications and the deal that they made with Apple, and whatever they’re ending up paying them, has had to have been set long before the AppleTV 2G was released. Either they felt that the cost, basically a 30% tax on the first month’s income from a subscriber, was worth it or Apple has negotiated individual deals with some of their closer partners. This is all speculation of course but yesterday’s announcement proves that at the very least, providers are still willing and eager to have their offerings on the iOS platform, regardless of the new harsher application of Apple’s guidelines.

The addition of MLB.TV and NBA programming on the AppleTV is a huge step forward for the media platform that I think the little black box will become in the next few years. It also portends the arrival of content that is more like on-demand and pay-per-view offerings that currently only exist through cable, or satellite, providers. This is a huge coup for Apple and a nice cherry on top of the release of iOS 4.3 for AppleTV, a glorified bug fix that adds Airplay for Apps support and not a whole lot else.

The 30% cut, or whatever the negotiated amount, that Apple is snagging from these providers proves a couple of things. First, we know that Apple is in open talks with companies looking to bring products to iOS. You don’t make deeply integrated apps and streaming offerings like MLB.TV available on the AppleTV on a whim. You can bet that there has been some intense work on the look and feel of the app and on the backend, likely via Apple’s new data center, to make streaming of live games possible in the AppleTV environment. This had to have been done hand-in-hand with the MLB and would never have taken place if they felt that the cost of entry was too high for the iOS platform.

Next we’ve got a window into the thoughts of providers looking to offer subscriptions on iOS as far as it’s importance in the consumption ecosystem. MLB.TV for instance is offered on just about every conceivable set top box already from Roku to your cable box and is in fact already available on the iPhone and iPad and has been for some time. Any sort of barrier to entry would have to have been considered even more closely because the service is so ubiquitous. They simply had to feel that the AppleTV was a necessary platform for them to make an appearance on. It’s most definitely not an exclusive way to watch the programming, but it is one of the best implemented and most popularized new avenues for people to partake of the MLB content. The coverage alone was probably worth the cost of admission, can you remember the last time hundreds of blogs wrote multiple articles that considered so closely the import of MLB content coming to any other set top box?

Lastly I think that this proves that we have little to worry about with regard to the future of subscription services like Netflix, Hulu and the like on the iOS platform. While the future of pure product services like Amazon are still very much up in the air, with little or no clarifications made public as to how Apple will handle those who literally cannot subsist on a 30% cut in profit, I think that the arrival of MLB and the NBA on AppleTV means that we have much more subscription goodness on the way.