Reasonable if you're very technically minded 19 January 2013 Reviewer: Henry from UK
203 of 386 people found this review helpful
I tried Blinkbox on several occasions to try and watch 2 rented films.
We have a PS3 so I tried that first as it's already connected to the TV so nice and convenient.
The quality was terrible. The picture was soft and dull and the motion was jerky and stuttering and buffering every few minutes. The sound seemed OK.
The jerky movement is, in my opinion, a problem with the encoding and the way it is being played in the web browser, not the slow servers. Their slow servers are probably the cause of buffering.
My PS3 is hard-wired to the internet connection (30mbs) not wireless and get good fast speeds on everything else.
Navigating to the web page is a pain on the PS3 not to mention having to put your email and password in - but I suppose that's not really their fault. A built-in app would be nice.
So having failed with the PS3 I went for the PC.
Streaming to the PC was nearly as bad quality wise with the dull image and jerky movement making it very unpleasant to watch. The constant buffering was there again.
So my final effort was to do a local PC download of the 2 movies I rented. Both downloaded OK - but only one would play. The first complained there was no licence issues despite both being purchased at the same time. The second played fine and the quality was better with no more jerky motion and we watched the whole film.
I gave full details of the playback fault to their technical support team who sent a vague response blaming Windows Media Player and telling me to update - but refunded the rental cost nevertheless.
Overall I'd say it was not a good experience. If this was someone completely non-technical I'm pretty sure they'd have given up long before I did - especially as my solution consisted of a laptop sat on an armchair connected to the TV with an HDMI cable.
In summary, I would not recommend BlinkBox to a friend.
