Right now, Amazon is the undisputed king of the book and media market in the UK — no one retailer sells more and it’s already managed to kill HMV and others — but Tesco’s hoping to change that. It’s apparently going to launch dedicated book and music retail sites to partner it’s movie service, Blinkbox. This means war.
According to the SubNews, Tesco’s nabbed Facebook’s head of retail for EMEA, Gavin Sathianathan, to head up the book section, named Blinkboxbooks — yeah, not the best name I’ve ever heard. Meanwhile, Blinkboxmusic will be lead by ex-EMI and Warner man, Mark Bennett, whom Tesco are pinching from Sainsbury’s digital.
All three Blinkbox-branded sites, sporting movies, TV, books and music will be operated separately from Tesco’s existing online stores, and will supposedly just carry subtle Tesco branding, probably akin to what it looks like now on the existing “Blinkbox from Tesco” site.
Tesco’s worried that everyone shopping on Amazon for single item things, like DVDs, books, and games, will put Amazon in a position to threaten Tesco’s dominance of other markets like groceries, and home appliances — it’s already happening in the US.
As an online-only property, I can’t see Tesco making much of a dent in the already saturated market for media stuffs, but, of course, the supermarket is going to push the services hard in-store. Tesco apparently wants to become the ‘world’s biggest multi-channel retailer’, and is already the third largest retailer across the globe. As long as it pays proper tax in the UK, that can only be good for the economy, even if the thought of buying books and music from Tesco makes me cringe a little