Blinkbox

» see blinkbox.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

blinkbox never reached turkey at any meaningful level. it was a uk-only transactional video service, the kind of thing tesco clubcard members rented on a friday night for a few pounds, the kind of thing that did not bother licensing anything outside britain. by the time i would have hit it, around 2011, my streaming life was a thinkpad with a vpn pointed at whatever catalogue would load on the other side. blinkbox sat in the part of the british consumer internet i could read about but never log into.

the company was started in october 2007 by michael comish and adrian letts with venture money. the pitch was pay-per-movie streaming at a time when the uk still associated film rental with the high street and lovefilm posted dvds through the door. blinkbox was the first uk service to push for direct download and stream-to-own at scale, browser-based, then later on xbox and smart tvs.

tesco bought an eighty percent stake on 20 april 2011 and rolled the rest in soon after. the supermarket wanted a digital entertainment leg to sit alongside its grocery and clubcard apparatus. for a while blinkbox movies was the consumer-facing piece of a wider blinkbox umbrella that also included blinkbox music and blinkbox books, each chasing competitors like spotify and kindle without ever catching one.

~ the case file ~

~ how it landed ~

at its widest reach blinkbox claimed roughly one million monthly users across movies and tv. that was a real number for a uk-only service in the early netflix era, but it was not enough to justify the supermarket's ambitions. tesco's broader digital push was already wobbling by 2014, and the new ceo dave lewis had begun a strip-down focused back on grocery margins.

~ the slide ~

on 8 january 2015 tesco sold blinkbox movies to talktalk for a nominal sum, reportedly a single-digit-million figure against a business that had once been the centerpiece of a digital strategy. in the same quarter blinkbox music went to guvera and was shut soon after, while blinkbox books was handed to whsmith and wound down. the umbrella collapsed inside a single fiscal window.

talktalk rebranded the movie service as talktalk tv store and pitched it as a bonus for broadband subscribers. for off-network customers, the ones who had used blinkbox without taking talktalk's broadband, the writing was on the wall, anyway. for whatever reason talktalk kept the legacy access alive for another three years.

~ the day it died ~

in may 2018 talktalk announced that off-network blinkbox customers would lose access and be migrated to rakuten tv. the service did not so much shut down as get folded inwards. the brand survived for a little while longer inside talktalk's bundle before being retired entirely. either way, the moment a uk pay-per-view service stops being available outside its parent's broadband network is the moment it has stopped being a service.

the strange afterlife of blinkbox is that almost no one in the uk now remembers which one of the three was the longest-running. blinkbox movies outlasted both books and music by years. but the brand died as a piece of supermarket strategy, not as a video service. it is one of the very few tesco failures that did not even leave a clearance shelf behind.

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