BlinkBox Reviews

(based on 79 reviews)

139 of 303 people found this review helpful

I bought 4 movies from Blinkbox, all of which were supposedly in HD.

I have tried them on two different devices,

a Sony Laptop with a 5Mb broadband connection, from Virgin media,
and the other a Surface Pro and on a 13Mb connection from EE, which never gets below 12Mb, connected to a 40 inch LCD TV via HDMI.

In both instances, the quality is nowhere near HD, not even close to 720p. There are times when you could be forgiven for thinking the quality is worth the full price, if you squint your eyes maybe, but the problem comes and goes - sometimes it looks OK and I just mean OK, not HD....and the next, there is so much MPEG blocking, it almost becomes offensive to watch. It becomes especially obvious when there is a lot of movement, or plenty of detail in the scene.

The only positive out of this is that the HD movies I bought only cost 50p...even at that price, I'm not sure I will be buying any more.

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

162 of 320 people found this review helpful

I wanted to use an on demand service without having to pay a subscription and Blinkbox seemed to be a good option as there were plenty of films and TV programmes available.

I checked the Blinkbox web site and found two supposedly compatible devices but the first one wouldn't work at all so had to go back for a refund and the second one had Blinkbox written all over the box, so you would have thought that it wouldn't fail?

Wrong, two days after we got it all installed and apparently working the Technika Smart TV Box stopped working with Blinkbox and hasn't worked since. A firmware upgrade was announced but the box will not update and so far Blinkbox customer support has been awful. You would have expected a better service from Tesco but sadly the service is poor, they don't respond to requests for support and the whole organisation appears to be a complete shambles.

I have already paid for a TV series and a film that I cannot watch and the response from Blinkbox has been to watch them on my PC or laptop instead. I want to watch them on my TV and the deal was... (Read the full review)

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

198 of 390 people found this review helpful

No app for many smart TVs (none for Panasonic Viera).

So tried to watch through PS3.

Shockingly, their advice is to use the PS3 web browser to watch content.

You can imagine the quality issues and difficulty this poses. No HD, for a start; very difficult navigation, annoying cursor on screen, difficult to switch to full-screen, etc.

Senseless they don't have an app for Viera or PS3 and little HD content.

The bill themselves as being "to the rescue" as Actetrax is closing; at least Acetrax had good apps on both Smart TV and PS3 and an easy-to-use interface.

All I can say is, RIP Acetrax.

Only plus side, they give you £6 free credit to find out how poor it is.

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

171 of 367 people found this review helpful

We're really struggling with the buffering issues, we have a very high connection but haven't been able to watch a film without constant interruption. I hope that Tesco's sorts this out soon as we like the idea of watching what we want when we want but it has to be a lot better than this for us to continue.

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

203 of 385 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.... (Read the full review)

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

140 of 344 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.

211 of 412 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.