A video on demand service brought to the Philippines by SM and Solar Entertainment. Blink is a movie and TV streaming service similar to Netflix or the local competitors HOOQ and IFLIX. With SM having connections to big Hollywood studios, thanks to their large number of cinemas, you would expect good things out of this. For those that don't remember, Blink was the streaming service of choice for a big Pacquiao fight and it crumbled under the pressure of too many viewers, putting a huge dent in it's reputation. Just like HOOQ, Blink requires the Microsoft Silverlight plugin, so you can’t use the Chrome browser. It should work in Internet explorer, firefox and safari. At 250 peso a month, Blink is more expensive than HOOQ and IFLIX. And their library substantially smaller; at the time of shooting this video they had 90 movies and 42 TV shows. Aside from the usual unlimited access to slightly older movies and TV shows, you can also pay to rent newer movies, for example you could rent Chappie for a fee of 99 peso. Giving you 7 days access to the movie. They have a great selection of payment methods, Credit cards, debit cards, Paypal, Smart load and gcash. The site is hosted on an Amazon AWS server. For some reason they chose an EU West region which has resulted in their server being in Ireland. I would have expected them to choose Asia pacific so their server would be in a closer country like Singapore, China or Japan. Although It’s not too important because it’s the content delivery network that serves up all the heavy media. The Content delivery network serving the videos is Limelight Networks, with servers based in Hong Kong. Although it would be nice (and faster) to host the content locally, it’s much cheaper to operate servers in Hong Kong than the Philippines. In my experience, HK is the best choice in terms of hops and latency and second would be Japan. Streaming on Mac or Windows rarely works and the site is absolutely awful. Streaming using the Android app on a cellphone works a lot of the time but also has problems with some content or times when it simply doesn't work. I monitored my network when watching a movie on the cellphone and saw that when opening the stream, it aggressively buffers ahead, consuming over 600Kb/sec. Then it drops down to around 100Kb/sec. The video quality varies hugely depending on the movie or TV show and their servers/network. Sometimes it's as clear as iflix and sometimes it's like the movie was recorded using a potato. There’s no option to change the quality and there doesn’t appear to be support for subtitles. A good thing is that it will remember where you stopped watching something and let you resume - a useful feature. The app doesn’t stop the phone from going to sleep, so you'll have to change your phones power saving settings so it doesn't go to sleep or turn off the screen. Before you can stream from blink, you have to register your device. You can have up to 3 devices registered at a time. This becomes kind of tedious if you’re swapping between devices because you have to unregister other devices to get your current device to work. The official site is blink-now.com SUPPORT ME: If you enjoyed this video, please remember to give a LIKE and click here to subscribe to my channel - http://www.youtube.com/subscription_center?add_user=philstuffs

• published: 25 Jun 2015
• views: 52