Blinkbox poster image via Elliot Brown/Flickr
After just two years, Tesco has rid its hands of Blinkbox, its digital downloads service, having agreed to a deal with Guevera to take the last piece of the service covering music and e-book downloads.
Seeing the growth of online streaming and cloud services, Tesco decided to purchase We7 for stg£10.2m in 2012 and subsequently e-book site Mobcast for stg£4.5m. both of which were brought under the new name of Blinkbox, according to Engadget.
In the intervening years, the take-up of its service showed little sign of it ever competing with the major players in the content streaming music and film industries and seeing its demise, the retailer saw it best to pull out of the game one piece at a time.
Telecoms company TalkTalk were the first to step in to purchase Blinkbox’s movie streaming and broadband services earlier this month with plans to integrate its services into their existing TV packages by the end of this year.
Now, music streaming company Guevera has come in to offer another way out for the service by purchasing its content and technical capabilities and integrating it with its existing music service who have already formed a partnership with Chinese mobile manufacturers Lenovo to offer its software pre-installed on phones.
The only remaining component of Blinkbox that remained was its e-book service with initial plans to sell this division to Waterstones falling through with Tesco now deciding it better to just shut it down at the end of this month for good.
