Better than expected 20 July 2013 Reviewer: Aspect1234 from West Yorkshire
173 of 345 people found this review helpful
I wanted to watch Game of Thrones season 3 and Blinkbox is the only legal way to watch this in the UK at present, so I decided to take the risk despite the poor reviews here. I was very pleasantly surprised with the result.
I live in West Yorkshire, have reliable internet speeds of 35Mb (plus.net), and was downloading to a Windows PC with Windows Media Centre connected to my HD TV.
I subscribed easily on the site, and received an introductory credit of £5. I had read some reviews that the blinkbox SD was poor quality so I decided to buy the HD version of Game of Thrones. The HD versions were in 720p. I download the first episode at about 8pm on a Wednesday night, the download took about 5 minutes for a 1hr episode ~ 2Gb (on par with iTunes).
The quality of the download was very good it played smoothly and without problem. However before I could view the video from the Windows Media Centre interface I had to start each file once from the desktop to authorise the DRM. This was one click if you use the download manager from blinkbox where you enter your username and password in the manager. Or if you download the files directly you have to enter your username and password when you start each file.
I found the download manager provided was simple and helped minimise the impact of the DRM. However I did have a problem where I could only queue one episode for download at a time. Most users would not have this problem as it was due to my PC having a very small SSD boot drive and the downloader wanted to download there first before moving the files to the directory I specified. I emailed blinkbox to let them know of the problem and received a response shortly after at about 00:30 at night! The response was first class, you could tell someone had read and understood the problem and it wasn't the typical canned response you often get.
I had already decided to download the other 9 episodes directly from the site with the provided link for each episode. I queued all 9 episodes to download in the Chrome web browser and it took less that an hour for all of them to arrive. The only issues with direct download were the file names were cryptic so you have to rename each file so you would know which were which, plus you need to enter your username and password the first time you open each file for the DRM.
So all in all I found it to be a good experience.
In summary, I would recommend BlinkBox to a friend.
