UK Google Nexus 7 tablets won't feature music, magazines or TV shows
GOOGLE'S NEXUS 7 TABLET won't arrive with all of the company's touted features including TV shows, music and magazines, Google has confirmed, making its £159 price-tag seem like less of a bargain.
Context & Ripple Effects
A week after Google made the Nexus 7 official at I/O with Android 4.1 Jelly Bean and a headline $199/£159 price, the company has confirmed that UK units will ship without the music, magazine and TV offerings that anchor the device's value story. The pickup was broad for a regional caveat — The Verge, Daring Fireball, TUAW and WebProNews all carried it on or about 4 July — because the missing content is precisely what justifies selling the hardware at that price.
First-order effects
- UK buyers at £159 get the Jelly Bean hardware but none of the Play media catalogue — music, magazines, TV shows — that frames the US pricing as a bargain, so the effective value proposition differs by market from day one.
Second-order effects
- UK publishers and music/TV rights holders lose the launch distribution channel their US counterparts get through Google Play, and Google's UK marketing has to sell the tablet on specs alone rather than an ecosystem bundle.
Third-order effects
- If content licensing keeps lagging hardware launches by region, the loss-leader playbook — cheap tablet subsidised by media consumption — delivers uneven returns across markets, pressuring Google to close licensing gaps before each hardware wave rather than after.
The trend: Tablet makers are pricing hardware near cost to drive content-store consumption, which makes regional licensing gaps a direct threat to the business model rather than a footnote.