The company published a blog post Friday morning outlining how it believes the Facebook can help developers concerned about the discoverability problem. Getting noticed in places like Apple’s App Store, Google’s Android Market, or the other big third-party Android app stores is tricky and often fleeting; sometimes the result of a fluke appearance on a “best of” list.

“On many of today’s mobile platforms, distribution is often a function of ranking and position in curated app stores,” wrote Facebook’s James Pierce, head of mobile developer relations. “While this benefits established apps and (those) that are editorially featured, for the majority of developers, getting an app discovered can present a real challenge.”

Facebook’s argument is that if app developers use Facebook to have users log into their apps, new users will discover that app naturally as friends share activity within the app on their News Feed. It cited examples such as Foodspotting’s iOS app and Diamond Dash, an iOS game that enjoyed a traffic increase “by a factor of 3″ after it started using Facebook’s Single Sign On technology. But Facebook would obviously like developers to think of Facebook itself as an app development platform, highlighting the Washington Post’s Social Reader Facebook app. (Donald Graham, CEO of The Washington Post Company, is a Facebook director and investor.)

Getting into bed with Facebook isn’t necessarily a recipe for instant success: of the 425 million people who accessed Facebook through a mobile device in a month, just 60 million, or 14 percent, go on to visit another app. Still, Facebook mobile usage is growing, and Facebook’s argument that people enjoy discovering new products, information, and perhaps apps from their friends is at the heart of what could be a historic initial public offering.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

What Apple does and doesn’t do

For a clue to how Apple approaches the video market, you need look no further than how it’s dealt with every other part of the media ecosystem to date: It creates good user experiences across an ecosystem of great products that publishers can sell their content on.

It introduced the iPod and iTunes and allowed the music industry to sell their songs on the platform, and it took a cut. It introduced the iPhone and the App Store and allowed developers to create games, utilities, productivity tools and the like, and it took a cut. It introduced the Apple TV for the Hollywood studios and TV networks to rent and sell their movies and shows to consumers, and it took a cut. It introduced the iPad, iBooks and the Newstand and allowed book and magazine publishers to sell digital versions of their titles to consumers, and it took a cut.

You notice a trend here? Product, platform, revenue share. That model has been extremely profitable for Apple, in part because it’s had to bear little risk to collect whatever revenues and profits come from its partners’ content sales. What Apple does not do is pay upfront to have the luxury of carrying content and then shoulder all the risk while attempting to create a sustainable new business model for its partners.

The economics of the situation

But let’s talk about the actual economics of subscription pay TV. Time Warner Cable announced in its earnings Thursday that it paid somewhere around $25 a month per subscriber in content costs last quarter. Think Apple could do better? It can’t. Any new entrant to the pay TV market acquiring content licenses does so at rates higher than what others have previously negotiated. This was true when the satellite TV companies entered the business, it was true when Verizon and AT&T began offering IPTV services, and it will be true for anyone that attempts to create a virtual cable company.

Starting costs for Apple — or anyone else for that matter — to build a subscription TV service will be in the mid-$30s at the very least. Which means it’s not going to roll out a $25 or $30 subscription service or undercut your local cable company on price anytime soon.

You know how every quarter analysts dissect however many billions of dollars Microsoft has lost in its Internet services business? That would be Apple TV’s media business, quarter after quarter, if it decided to go down this road. Sure, Apple has a lot of money. And sure, Apple could bear those costs. But why would it? What’s the actual benefit for Apple or its investors?

The misplaced dream of a la carte

“But what if I don’t want all of the channels? That’s where Apple could really disrupt things!” It’s a familiar refrain to hope and wish and pray that a company like Apple will be able to do what others have failed at so far, and negotiate a la carte pricing for individual networks. That sure sounds good, and I’m sure consumers would love it! That is, until they saw the price tags associated with each of the networks that they would want to buy.

Even if Apple were able to convince Disney, for instance, to separate ABC, the Disney networks and ESPN’s sports networks from the bundle, it would be just like breaking up any other bundle: the cost to sell each network separately would be egregiously expensive. Prohibitively so.

As a consumer, would you pay $5 just for ABC? Another $5 each for CBS, NBC and Fox? Then $15 or $20 for ESPN? And $25 for HBO? It’s not like these guys are just going to give those channels away at a small premium over what they get from cable. If they’re going to break the subscription bundle, they’re going to want to get paid to do it. In that world, how many channels do you think you could buy before the cost became more than what you already pay for a cable subscription each month?

The actual market opportunity

Put all that aside, though, and the truth of the matter is that streaming video is still a relatively niche market. How many people are out there who actually have an interest in a streaming TV service? In theory, the addressable market is every broadband household that also pays for cable service. But take a look at the number of Apple TVs that are out there (just 4.2 million) or the connect rate on smart TVs today, and you see that very few people are actually taking advantage of broadband-delivered video. That could change with the introduction of the mythical iTV, but it seems pretty tiny today.

Sure, Apple created the modern smartphone market with the iPhone or the tablet market with the iPad. But it’s not into creating new services. And it seems unlikely that Apple would introduce a new service like this, especially one that is likely to be risky, unprofitable and targeting a market segment that doesn’t yet exist.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Who and what to watch in the new era of the living room
• When video gets democratized, who wins and who loses?
• LTE changes everything; LTE changes nothing

The new iBooks interactive textbooks, which come from major educational publishers like McGraw-Hill and Pearson, among others, were unveiled last week at an Apple media event in New York City. The textbooks were the primary focus of the event, which also saw the introduction of iBooks Author, an e-book creation tool, and an iTunes U-dedicated iOS application. iBooks Author saw 90,000 downloads in the three days following its introduction, Global Equities Research said, but it didn’t share numbers for iTunes U.

That Apple would see 350,000 downloads of its iBooks textbooks immediately following their unveiling is not surprising, especially given that the store offers free samples, as well as one of its highlighted books free in its entirety. Curiosity, media interest and a desire to check out something new from Apple’s digital storefront would definitely all contribute to heightened interest.

The real test, however, will be whether or not Apple’s textbooks can keep up their momentum long-term. AllThingsD’s John Paczkowski points out that publishers are counting on higher volume sales at lower prices to make selling digital textbooks at $15 more profitable than selling paper versions at $75. But getting schools and parents to buy into a system in which books can’t be passed on from student to student, and which could potentially be paid for directly by parents themselves won’t be a simple matter. Not to mention that iPads are required to make the system work, which obviously represents a considerable expense in itself.

Over at ZDNet, James Kendrick has a good round-up of the arguments against Apple’s textbook initiative succeeding. He lists a lot of good points, but overall you get the sense that the biggest problem might just be a lot of hesitation from schools about adopting a model so different from what’s currently in place. Institutional inertia is not easily overcome, after all.

Three hundred fifty thousand digital textbooks downloaded in three days is definitely impressive, and could bode well for Apple’s textbooks initiative; people are obviously interested, and that’s a good thing. But the real test is yet to come. Download numbers following the kick-off of the school year next fall will definitely be a better time to make prognostications about the success or failure of Apple’s latest venture.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• A clouded view of Google Music
• Connected consumer first-quarter 2013: Analysis and outlook
• The evolution of consumer-media cloud storage

Apple’s launch of a new suite of textbook-related services for the iPad is being widely celebrated, and with good reason. The ability to have beautiful, interactive and easy to use e-books on the tablet makes a huge amount of sense — as startups like Inkling have been arguing for a while — and Apple’s new book-authoring software could open publishing to a much broader market. But as usual, all this great design requires a major tradeoff: namely, that schools and publishers agree to be locked inside Apple’s walled-garden ecosystem. That might be fine for music and movies and games like Angry Birds, but is that really appropriate for educational material?

My GigaOM colleague Darrell Etherington has written about both the launch of the new iBooks2 — which includes thousands of interactive textbooks from some of the publishing industry’s major players, such as Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and McGraw-Hill, for $14.99 or less — and about the new book-authoring software Apple also launched on Thursday, called iBook Author. The latter allows for drag-and-drop creation of books, including embedded Keynote presentations, videos and other interactive features. And Erica Ogg of GigaOM has written about what this evolution of the book means, in terms of how that interactivity can improve textbooks.

Digital textbooks have benefits, but should Apple own them?

There’s no question that digital books have plenty of benefits: Not only can students carry more of them in electronic form, but they can also be distributed more cheaply (one of the reasons why publishers are likely willing to accept a much lower price point) and they can be updated if the information changes — something that’s impossible with printed textbooks. Plus, Apple’s books have 3-D interactive illustrations and the ability to create study notes automatically, and the launch of an expanded iTunes U allows teachers to connect their curriculum directly to those digital textbooks in interesting ways.

But where do these new, fantastically interactive books live? Only on iOS devices like the iPad, of course. Although the new iBooks software Apple launched appears to be based on the open ePub standard for e-books, it has enough proprietary tweaks in it that it likely won’t be compatible in either direction (at least not without a lot of effort). Once you create a book using the publishing software, you can save it as a PDF and send it to someone — but if you want to sell it, the end-user licence Apple makes you sign (or click on) says you can only sell it through the Apple iTunes store. Even the usually-supportive Apple blogger John Gruber of Daring Fireball says this is “Apple at its worst.”

The same thing goes for the textbooks that are going to be supplied by Houghton Mifflin and McGraw-Hill for $14.99 or less per copy: They will only live on iPads, which cost $500 or so each — unless Apple plans to offer some kind of educational bulk discount or special version of the device, the way it did with the original iMacs, but there was no word about that kind of program in Thursday’s announcement.

Do we want to give Apple control over the curriculum?

As one writer with some experience in the educational system pointed out at Cnet, as appealing as it might be, the kind of cost and investment involved in rolling out digital textbooks would be beyond the ability of most schools, even if they were to somehow land a major educational grant for such a purchase. And if a school buys books in bulk, according to a Wired magazine description of the program, they would have to repurchase new versions of all those textbooks for every new school year.

But the biggest criticism of Apple’s attempt to co-opt the educational system doesn’t have anything to do with costs: If its digital textbooks became the standard in schools, it would commit those institutions to a much broader — and theoretically much more dangerous — relationship with a technology provider than we have ever seen. Apple’s iMacs may have made their way into every school, but they didn’t control a key part of the curriculum. Every textbook would effectively have to be approved by Apple, and the software that controlled them would belong to Apple alone.

It’s possible Apple is planning to open up its new iBook textbooks, either by embracing the ePub standard or making it easy to move texts out of its system and into another, so iBooks can live alongside Inkling textbooks or CourseSmart books or Kno books — but if it’s planning to do that, we didn’t hear anything about it on Thursday. All we heard was how Apple wants to do the same thing to the textbook market as it has done to recorded music and mobile gaming: that is, own and control it.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr users Giuseppe Bognanni and Jeremy Mates

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Takeaways from connected consumer’s second quarter
• The evolution of consumer-media cloud storage
• How social discovery is transforming entertainment

Most students and educators who’ve been in school in the past 10 years have probably run across Blackboard, or some similar system for managing courses online in an interactive digital environment. Generally speaking, those systems are lacking in a lot of ways: navigating them can be difficult for new users; the same content can easily be filed in multiple places, leading to confusion; they usually aren’t engaging or attractive in terms of visual design.

Apple’s iTunes U addresses all those problems. It uses a UI that mimics the real world, which some people say is the wrong approach, but should help students and education professionals who grew up using traditional tools transition to digital methods. iTunes U also organizes things organically and according to common-sense logic, which should provide a greater uniformity of experience regardless of who’s putting together the course package. Finally, like all Apple products, it invites touch and interaction. There’s actually something satisfying about tapping off tasks and assignments listed in each course package.

The courses in iTunes U work on a subscription model, so you’re automatically kept up-to-date as a course proceeds. The course catalog makes it easy to find what you’re looking for, with specific sections for post-secondary education, programs from outside universities and colleges, and K-12-targeted material. Like Apple’s other digital marketplaces, it also provides highlighted courses chosen by Apple’s team, as well top charts and categories.

From the perspective of someone who’s designed a course syllabus and planned a class of study, this definitely seems like a great tool for educators. You can lay out exactly the course of action students need to take, complete with videos, slides and assignments listed as items in a list, where you can access them directly. It not only makes it easier for students to follow an instructor’s thinking, but should also help instructors better plan, organize and imrpove their courses.

If there’s one major downside to the iTunes U app, it’s that it’s most definitely exclusionary; students need an iPad, iPod touch or iPhone to take full advantage. Obviously, that’s Apple’s goal: to attract more users by providing appealing software experiences, and I definitely think it’ll succeed based on what I’ve seen so far.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• A clouded view of Google Music
• Who and what to watch in the new era of the living room
• Cloud and data first-quarter 2013: analysis and outlook

Courses will appear on a bookshelf, as in iBooks, but teachers can add much more to courses, including a syllabus, office hours, topics of classes, notes and posted assignments. Students can click through assignments to automatically view the requisite chapter in an e-book, if it’s available in the iTunes library.

Videos can be streamed or downloaded directly to the iPad for later viewing, and courses can also contain audio, video, documents like PDFs, and even apps. Students can rate courses in the iTunes U store, just like they would books or software. Combined with custom-authored e-books created in iBooks Author, this looks like the ultimate tool for the truly hands-on professor. And unlike the initial iBooks textbooks, it’s specifically aimed at higher education.

Grades K-12 aren’t left out, however. Cue also revealed iTunes U will now be available for primary and secondary educators and students, as well. The service is available in 123 countries. The iTunes U app is available today in the App Store, for free, and is designed to work on both the iPad and iPhone.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• A clouded view of Google Music
• Who and what to watch in the new era of the living room
• How social discovery is transforming entertainment

Video calling service Tango’s new paid features have experienced two million subscribers on both Android and iOS since their introduction, Tango founder and CTO Eric Setton told the New York Times on Monday. But those using Apple’s platform convert from the app’s free basic service to paid add-ons four times as often as do Android users. Setton thinks there is a very simple reason why that is, one that doesn’t have to do with app quality or platform user demographics:

It comes from years of collecting credit card numbers on iTunes. People can use their stored credit card numbers and purchase things easily. Punching in a credit card number on Android is more work.

Of course, you can add and store credit cards on the Android Market, too, but that’s an additional step on Google’s OS that isn’t required on Apple’s for most, since credit cards will already be on file, thanks to previous iTunes music or movie purchases. Also, iTunes allows multiple payment methods; you can tie it to iTunes gift cards or preapproved spending limits automatically, making it more flexible overall.

People are also slow to adopt new online payment methods, which is why it is so crucial that the App Store doesn’t require one; users simply have to continue using the same system they have already embraced for purchasing digital music online for nearly a decade. The iTunes Store has been the No. 1 music retailer since 2008, so it has had plenty of time to win the trust of a large number of users. Google, on the other hand, traditionally hasn’t asked its users to pay a dime for pretty much anything.

The good news for Google is that the barrier to entry for users new to any and all online purchasing is roughly the same for both platforms, meaning eventually users should be just as comfortable with paying on one OS vs. the other. The good news for Apple, though, is that for the time being, it remains the trusted vendor of choice for online purchases, particularly among the generation that cut its teeth on iPods and the iTunes Store.

So far, that role has led to increased consumer activity on Apple’s digital stores and devices, but Apple’s recently introduced EasyPay system indicates its effects could bleed over into real-world transactions, too. Google may have gotten Wallet out into the wild early, but trust could trump speed when it comes to long-term mobile commerce adoption.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• A clouded view of Google Music
• Why Android’s openness could cause real trouble for Google
• Mobile first-quarter 2013: analysis and outlook

The study found that Apple’s online store achieved an average score of 85 out of a possible 100 from its 3,000 polled online mobile shoppers, beating Amazon by just one point. ForeSee’s research covered both the websites and apps of the top 40 most frequented online commerce websites in the U.S. In a linked ForeSee survey of 8,500 online shoppers at traditional websites conducted for the study, Apple scored 83 overall, tying for second with Avon behind Amazon’s score of 88.

I am actually surprised that Apple scored so highly among mobile shoppers, since the mobile site for store.apple.com actually isn’t tailored to mobile screens at all; it’s the same site people reach when they visit the store in their desktop browser. But the study covers both apps and websites, and Apple has a very impressive app for its store for iPhone devices.

The app was updated this year to provide access to Apple’s new EasyPay option for purchasing low-cost items in physical retail locations as well as in-store pickup of in-stock items and the ability to order custom Mac hardware configurations. And it definitely stands out from the crowd. Because it is Apple’s own app, users can even pay for items using their existing iTunes account, so there is no need to enter any payment or delivery information as long as you have that info on file.

Some might criticize Apple’s approach as limiting its appeal beyond a core audience of iPhone users, but the results of this ForeSee study suggest it is doing something right. Maybe that has to do with the increased tendency users have to check out apps first and the web second when on mobile.

Still, ForeSee notes that for the time being, mobile devices generally play more of a role in research than in actually pulling the trigger on a purchase. Thirty-four percent of online shoppers use mobile channels for learning more about products, but only 15 percent actually bought the product on a mobile device. That is an increase from last year, however, when just 11 percent of shoppers actually bought from their phones.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• A clouded view of Google Music
• Cloud and data first-quarter 2013: analysis and outlook
• Research In Motion: future scenarios for its fate

The case for content

In his research note, Wu argues that it’s not the technology which is holding back Apple from shipping product, but striking content deals that will make an Apple television a more compelling competitor in the smart TV market. In short, Wu argues that whatever content Apple licenses will be key in driving consumer adoption. He even suggests that Apple could truly differentiate its product by offering an a la carte model for choosing packages of shows or channels.

Of course, Wu isn’t alone. We’ve also seen the suggestion floated that Apple could drive hardware sales by pulling a Netflix and jumping into original content creation or exclusive licensing of certain programming.

The reality of the situation

For those waiting for Apple to create its own virtual TV service, or to allow users to pick and choose their favorite channels or TV shows: don’t hold your breath. Apple has reportedly been trying to strike licensing deals that would allow it to roll out its own subscription-based video offering for years, to no avail. And the most obvious reason it’s been unable to make something work is that the economics just don’t make sense.

As for a la carte: There is absolutely no incentive for content creators to unbundle their programming in this way, especially not for an unlaunched, unproven product in the nascent connected TV market. Even if they did, licensing terms for individual subscriptions of certain networks would be egregiously expensive, to the point where it would be difficult for Apple to profitably create such an offering.

And finally, before anyone even thinks about original programming, they have to build audience first. Look at Netflix, or any of the basic cable networks that have started licensing exclusive TV shows. In all cases they were “rerun TV” long before they reached a large enough audience to justify building their own original content.

Where Apple can provide value

If Apple is smart, it won’t set out to disrupt the programming industry by creating a la carte packages of licensed content. Think of it as “If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.” Apple is not going to be able to disrupt the TV industry, so it might as well give the TV industry the tools it needs to improve their offerings for consumers.

Apple should look to content providers as developers, trusting in the strength of its platform to prove compelling enough for them to build differentiated user experiences. In the same way that Apple opened up developer tools for its mobile and tablet platforms, having a software development kit and app store on the iTV (and most likely the Apple TV set-top box) will allow content partners to create their own applications on top of the iOS platform.

What’s more, the timing for such a plan is finally coming together: The TV industry has come to accept that over-the-top apps will be paramount to their success in the future. That’s why you see pay TV operators like Comcast, Verizon, Time Warner Cable and others building applications for game consoles like Microsoft’s Xbox 360 and for connected TVs. That’s why, with the launch of the iTV, Apple won’t necessarily have to appeal to the industry to get on board with where it’s going — networks and operators are already moving toward an app-centric approach to video access and delivery.

Death of the set-top and second-screen opportunities

So why would a content provider build an app for iTV? For one thing, because doing so would allow it to get rid of costly set-top boxes and deliver a dynamic user interface directly for the TV set. I’ve written extensively about the death of the set-top box, so won’t go into too much detail here, but there’s a real opportunity for operators to save big in a world where customers can provide their own equipment for video search and navigation. By building an app for the iTV, for instance, Verizon or any other operator would have one less piece of equipment to provide, and one less need for a truck roll to a customer’s home.

But it goes beyond that: Due to the vast ecosystem of Apple devices, there’s a real opportunity for operators and networks to create compelling cross-device experiences in a living room where users have an iTV, iPhone and iPad all at once. Until now, the second-screen experience has been incredibly fragmented because there are few really compelling ways to sync up what you’re watching on TV with the app you’re using on your iPad. But imagine a world where watching HBO Go on the iTV while having the mobile app open would let the network provide an enhanced experience on the second screen.

In conclusion, let’s face it — striking content deals has never been a core competency for Apple in video. But providing a robust platform for developers to build engaging experiences on has been one of its key differentiators. When launching the iTV, Apple shouldn’t stray from that and try to be something it’s not good at, like a media company. Instead, it should offer up the tools to allow content creators to create compelling reasons for consumers to buy its new product.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Who and what to watch in the new era of the living room
• Takeaways from connected consumer’s second quarter
• Controversy, courtrooms and the cloud in Q1

1. iTunes gift certificates and apps. If you have an app, TV show, or songs you’d like to share, you can quickly and easily gift them to someone right from iTunes. Generic iTunes gift certificates are available in amounts of $10 to $50 in $10 increments if you’re not sure of a person’s exact tastes.

2. Online backup. Nothing says “I love you” like the gift of preventing data loss. If someone you’re buying for hasn’t developed an onsite backup strategy, you can both give a gift and do a good deed. Both CrashPlan and Backblaze (two of my favorite online backup services) offer gift subscriptions for $50. Sure, it isn’t a very fun gift, but it’s practical, and when a recipient accidentally lose a file, they’ll hopefully remember how you helped them.

3. Audible. I’ve been an Audible fan for a very long time. Someone who has a long commute to work will appreciate the wide variety of books that they can listen to via the service. You can give an individual book (the geek on your list will love “Ready, Player One” narrated by Wil Wheaton) or give a monthly subscription that allows for multiple purchases. Three month subscriptions start at $45.

4. Pandora One. For the audiophile who loves their custom stations and playlists but winces when they hear an ad, how about a gift subscription to Pandora? No more pink cupcakes. I’d suggest Spotify, but gift subscriptions aren’t available in the U.S. yet. Coal in that company’s stocking for sure.

5. Hulu+ or Netflix. If the hard-to-shop-for person on your list loves TV or movies, a gift subscription of Hulu+ or Netflix will allow for streaming of video content to their iPad, iPhone, and desktop. Unfortunately Hulu+ doesn’t work directly on the Apple TV, so Netflix would be a better choice for users of that device. Both products have gift subscriptions that start at $7.99, and both give you a choice of attractive gift certificates to print at home.

There you have it. You didn’t procrastinate, you were simply waiting for the perfect gift, and now you have a great list. Happy holidays and next time, plan ahead!

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Who and what to watch in the new era of the living room
• Connected Consumer Q2: Digital music meets the cloud; e-book growth explodes
• How consumer media will change in 2013