Blinkbox Online Movie Service
You might already know about the online movie rental & purchase website Blinkbox, but let’s pretend that you know nothing about it. Basically Blinkbox offers a service where you can access a huge library of movies & TV shows for either rental or purchase (and some of which are available for free), which can either be streamed directly from their website or downloaded to your PC to watch whenever you want.
If you rent then you have 24 hours to watch your rental as many times as you want from the moment you first start to watch the rental and if you purchase a title then you obviously have the ability to watch it forever.
The one limitation to purchasing a title is that once it is played on a PC for the first time the download is licensed to that PC only and cannot be watched on any other PC or device (which does throw up certain problems, but I’ll tell you about this later). Likewise, you cannot burn purchases to a disc.
You can also access the Blinkbox website from a PS3 if you own one, which is how I first heard about the service. The only limitations to the PS3 service is that not all titles are available to be streamed by Sony’s console & you cannot download titles to it either. But the streaming service does work very well.
So far I have purchased two titles from Blinkbox, Avatar & Cirque Du Freak: The Vampires Assistant, and feel I am now in a position to offer an opinion of this service.
The purchase process itself is simple enough. You find a title you want (with prices for rentals starting at 99p and purchases from £3.99) and, once selected, either sign up or, if you’re already a member login to the site. Once your purchase is complete your selected title is available in your Video Library where you can either start watching the title via the streaming service or download the title using the Blinkbox Download Manager to your PC.
The downloads vary in size, for example Cirque Du Freak was 1.2GB whereas Avatar is 1.9GB, and on my connection, which averages between 4 & 6MB, they took a little over an hour to download.
Once downloaded you can watch the title &, on the first play you have to sign into Blinkbox to authorise & download the license to activate the title for playback (which takes seconds) and you can sit back and enjoy your movie.
So what about the video quality? Well, with my computer hooked up to my HD TV I can honestly say that the quality of picture is at least comparable to DVD and the sound is crisp & clear.
The website also offers more than just TV & movies, with trailers of forthcoming attractions, the ability to send “Blinks” (essentially a scene from a movie which you can send to friends like an E-Card), and competitions.
But what of problems? Well, I experienced a problem when I first downloaded Avatar. I obviously played the video briefly to see what the quality of the video was like, which tied the movie to my PC. No problem, apart from the fact that a few days later my PC died & I had to reload it.
When I then downloaded Avatar again & tried to play it back the file couldn’t be authorised because it was tied to my previous installation of Windows. A couple of emails to Blinkbox support later & everything was sorted & I was able to watch Avatar without any problems at all, which I was not only very happy with but amazed at how quick & friendly the support staff were.
Basically, if you’re looking for another way to experience movies without leaving your sofa then Blinkbox is a service that I can totally recommend and will personally be using for purchases & rentals for a long time to come.
To check it out visit Blinkbox’s website and sign up now.
4 Responses to “Blinkbox Online Movie Service”
This was not my experience. I found that the avs adress recognition service Blinkbox uses wol dnot recognise my home address no matter how I entered it, which has led to much wasted time. I’m still unable to purchase any online films from Blinkbox.
I subscribed to Bliknbox, rented ‘The Three Musketeers’, got about 20 minuits in and it froze. Next night tried again, this time I got 30 minuted in and it froze.
I emailed Blinkbox, whi emailed back and said I should email their support dept, Which I did.
Two weeks later I’m still waiting for a reply. Not thew best thing Tesco’s gas got into.
The service works ok most of the time but Saturday night is a massive fail. Films will buffer every 30 seconds and then fail to play.
Issue reported but they try to blame my broadband, not likely when I’m on BT infinity!
I would not recomend Blink Box at all!!! I have spent trying to watch a 90min film and only managed the first 2o min in over 20 hours!!! Buffering, time delay, picture freezing are the problems. You can forget about FF as this just disconects me from the server. I even upgraded to wired from wireless conection and my broadband conection is btw 3-5MB, so it should work but it does’t. I couldn’t find a support phonenumber and won’t even try mailing as have no faith in Blinkbox.
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