Woot, out of nowhere, Apple announces their App Store subscriptions. What this means is, anything currently available in the company’s online marketplace, including magazines, newspapers, video, and music, can now be offered on the subscription model.

Subscriptions purchased from within the App Store will be sold using the same App Store billing system that has been used to buy billions of apps and In-App Purchases. Publishers set the price and length of subscription (weekly, monthly, bi-monthly, quarterly, bi-yearly or yearly). Then with one-click, customers pick the length of subscription and are automatically charged based on their chosen length of commitment (weekly, monthly, etc.). Customers can review and manage all of their subscriptions from their personal account page, including cancelling the automatic renewal of a subscription. Apple processes all payments, keeping the same 30 percent share that it does today for other In-App Purchases.

“Our philosophy is simple-when Apple brings a new subscriber to the app, Apple earns a 30 percent share; when the publisher brings an existing or new subscriber to the app, the publisher keeps 100 percent and Apple earns nothing,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “All we require is that, if a publisher is making a subscription offer outside of the app, the same (or better) offer be made inside the app, so that customers can easily subscribe with one-click right in the app. We believe that this innovative subscription service will provide publishers with a brand new opportunity to expand digital access to their content onto the iPad, iPod touch and iPhone, delighting both new and existing subscribers.”

Apparently, publishers are restricted from linking out of the app to locations that allow the user to circumvent the in-app purchase (and publishers can’t offer better deals outside of the app store). Apple gets thirty percent off the top off in-app purchases — enough of a cut, we’re guessing, to prompt some bigger publishers to skip the platform altogether (outside purchases, of course, are exempt from this fee).