BlinkBox Reviews

(based on 79 reviews)

205 of 403 people found this review helpful

Blinkbox comes as a standard App on Samsung Smart TV's. The selection of films is quite good but I have less than a 30% success rate in watching them without severe technical hitches. I've come to the conclusion that they have insufficient server capacity during peak periods. The service is near useless between 6pm and midnight however if you watch the film you've bought that evening the following morning then it works fine.

I have a 24M business DSL line which rarley slows even at peak times and Lovefilm (another app supplied on Samsung Smart TV's) always works perfectly even at peak hours so I'm pretty sure the issue is with Blinkbox.

All in all until they fix their peak times capacity issue I wont be renting any more films from them.

In summary, I would not recommend BlinkBox to a friend.

202 of 402 people found this review helpful

I am used to watching movies and TV online using BBC iPlayer, Netflix or other services and I expected Blinkbox to be similar. I bought a season pass to Game of Thrones expecting an equivalent experience but the quality is so bad it is unwatchable. It is like watching a badly copied video tape from the 1980s. The sound is muted and dull, the colours grey and washed out, with extremely low resolution. iPlayer and all the other streaming services look fine so it is not my connection. I have watched Blinkbox movies before that looked OK so I do not know what has changed, but I have seriously thought of trying to get my money back. I understand that Blinkbox has recently switched to the Microsoft Silverlite streaming software solution, which is popular with movie studios and businessmen because of its very heavy encryption, but hated by users for its appallingly bad quality so maybe that is the problem. Really the the strange square artefacts you see on screen with a bad connection are the size of postage stamps and the background shimmers like a constantly changing mosaic! And the sound is muted and dull as if you have... (Read the full review)

In summary, I would not recommend BlinkBox to a friend.

224 of 420 people found this review helpful

I have had both good and bad experiences with BlinkBox, currently trying to watch Descendants and failing miserably, am about an hour into the movie and it keeps telling me my connection has failed - which it hasn't, tried rebooting but this has failed, so now I am in the annoying position of having paid for movie, but not able to watch the end!!! Argh, Very frustrating. Am trying to watch this through my new Samsung "smart" tv.

In summary, I would not recommend BlinkBox to a friend.

139 of 343 people found this review helpful

Not at all user friendly. They give out e-mails suggesting 99p movies on Mondays, but when trying to obtain this offer, it indicates that the password is not valied! Also, I have twice had the situation where when trying to download the 99p films it charges me full price although when obtaining the film for rental it showed 99p. I have had one occasion when they rebated the difference when I complained then put a time limit on it. When I failed to watch another film within the time frame, they withdrew the offer. I complained again and they reimbursed me again, but when I went to use the credit, they again charged me full price for the rental. I am not at all happy with the service they provide. I would not recommend this to anyone. They need to make changes to their service in order for it to be more user friendly before I will use them again. I will now try Lovefilms!!

In summary, I would not recommend BlinkBox to a friend.

210 of 411 people found this review helpful

Not very straight forward to register as not recognised my e mail address so but long winded! I watched bridesmaids which was quite pleased with but went off a few times kept buffering and message keeps popping up asking to check my network connections which I find odd as it keeps me logged on, so frustrating as I cannot watch the end???

In summary, I would recommend BlinkBox to a friend.

197 of 427 people found this review helpful

We got a £50 Blinkbox voucher with our new Samsung TV, so we thought we'd give it a shot.

There's a lot of movies to choose from, although a fair few do look like car-boot sale, straight-to-DVD releases.

I also couldn't see how to alphabetically sort, although that may be hidden somewhere (movies are ranked by popularity).

We watched Bridesmaids and it was strikingly poor - standard definition and rather murky and fuzzy with artifacts everywhere - the sort of image you'd get on a low-bandwidth satellite +1 channel. Way worse than a DVD.

What made it more annoying was that as we viewed it though our Samsung TV's built-in Smart HUB, there was no option to turn off Motion Plus, so everything moves around in a surreal super-smooth fashion (the 'soap opera effect'), which is massively distracting on movies recorded at 25Hz.

So on the strength of what watched for £4, I'd not recommend it. In fact I'd rather wait for some of the older movies to appear on an HD satellite channel than view them on Blinkbox.

So not good on the strength of what we've seen.

In summary, I would not recommend BlinkBox to a friend.

180 of 365 people found this review helpful

Just signed up to blinkbox and watched True Grit. I was slightly apprehensive reading the negative review on here so before spending money on anything I signed up (which is free) and tested the quality with one of the free movies on offer. After finding none of the judder mentioned in the previous review, I paid £2.99 to 'rent' a film. Maybe it

Good points:
- Very easy to sign up and find films
- Nice website layout
- Cheaper than renting a physical DVD/itunes

Bad:
- Adverts on free films
- More of a hassle to set up than just putting a dvd in the player

Conclusion: Would highly recommend for a cheap (and legal) way of watching newly released films online. In my opinion superior to itunes in this respect, which can be a bit of a rip off.

In summary, I would recommend BlinkBox to a friend.

210 of 394 people found this review helpful

I rented this film, and started watching while it downloaded. Unfortunately it took many hours to download and we were not able to finish watching the film in one go. By the time the film had fully downloaded and we were able to watch it the 24 hour deadline had expired. I emailed Blinkbox to explain and have had a very negative response.

On another occasion the film playback was very jumpy.

In summary, I would not recommend BlinkBox to a friend.

194 of 374 people found this review helpful

I rented "Nativity" this week for my children - my first use of Blinkbox. It cost £2.99 to rent "for 24 hours" (£4 in local DVD club) and downloaded in ~15 minutes. Maybe there is a better way of doing this, but I ended up with a 1GB WMV file on my laptop (dual core, fast chip). I then plugged the laptop into a 32" SONY LCD TV via a HDMI cable and played the Movie using Windows Media player. It all worked fine, and the resolution was pretty good, the only downside was the jerky motion and screen flashes. My children didn't notice but I found it quite offputting.

I may use it again, given that I detest Blockbusters (poor customer service, very scratched older DVDs and never enough of the more popular DVDs) but would ideally want better picture quality before I used this regularly.

In summary, I would recommend BlinkBox to a friend.