JB Hi-Fi Likely To Expand NOW Music Platform While TV Sales Slip


JB Hi-Fi’s NOW music streaming service has been trundling along quite nicely for the company, CEO Terry Smart revealed today at the latest results announcement, so much so that the company plans to expand the service into “new media categories” this year, and I bet I can guess what it will be: software.

When the NOW service went live last year, Terry Smart said that it would expand if music streaming proved successful.

Way back in 2011 I wrote over at ZDNet:

JB Hi-Fi’s service will eventually become a music download store, building on the store’s strong background in the music retail sector. [According to Terry Smart] the electronics and media retailer hinted that the store may also become a digital software marketplace.

“Post launch, the ‘JB Hi-Fi Now’ digital platform will continue to develop and provide us with opportunities to leverage our existing strong software supplier relationships,” the company revealed in its investor presentation, making it a future challenger for the Mac App Store, for example.

So NOW will either evolve into a music download store — which it already sort of does — or a digital software marketplace. Both would be great, but the best thing JB Hi-Fi could do would be to open its own movie and TV streaming platform with the support of distributors. We’ll just have to wait and see.

Speaking of TV and media, JB Hi-Fi reported a decline in TV sales in the second half of 2012:

Whilst we continue to see total sales growth, the Visual (TV) category in particular negatively impacted comparative store growth. The industry has seen TV sales decline over the past few years as the category moves towards a more typical replacement-driven sales market. The JB brand however continued to attract customers with our market share growing solidly.

It seems everyone has all the TVs they need and are only buying more when one of them dies.

Read the full results over at the Australian Stock Exchange. [ASX]