Brad Rees

Recently blinkbox pushed a new release of the site onto the live environment which adds a number of quite cool features that we have been working on over the last few months. As the UI lead engineer I’m quite excited by these so I thought I would share.

Perhaps my favourite change is that now any of the free movies or TV icons have a ‘Free’ overlay applied to them automatically. This is great at calling out how much free content we have, which is actually quite a lot now (loving the snowboarding titles we have)! We also are using the same system for showing off trailers, in case you notice the similarity. Additionally for trailer titles we also show the date they are to be released in the cinemas, or if they are currently showing, underneath the player (for example Avatar).

Free titles shown with a blue overlay

For those wanting more than free content we have a number of improvements for purchasing our premium content. Firstly the browse catalogue now supports price filters, which is quite handy for finding cheap flicks. Secondly we now have box sets and bundles – so you can buy a whole TV season or a movie bundle (Godfather Trilogy perhaps?). And lastly we are now securely storing credit card details for repeat purchases, much like Amazon. Using this I think you can go from browsing to watching in under a minute if the title is available for streaming – which is much quicker than trekking to the local rental store.

We have also updated the Games area and added a new video jigsaw. This is good fun on the easy a medium skills, although the hard setting can take a little while – you’ve been warned. All the current competitions are now listed on a dedicated competition page for all the competition junkies.

Last but by no means least is the member referral system – pass on your invite code after a purchase and you’ll get £1, while your mates will get £5 credit each! That is more than enough for even the latest rentals. I think this is a great deal for everyone so get it while it’s hot.