Talk Talk to integrate and rebrand Blinkbox

Since agreeing to acquire Blinkbox, Tesco’s on-demand streaming service, TalkTalk has revealed its plans to integrate the service with its own brand.

The broadband provider will make Blinkbox part of its existing pay-TV service, a service with over 1.2m subscribers.

TalkTalk’s managing director for consumer, Tristia Harrison, said, “Today is a good day for us since we see the acquisition as an acceleration of our current TV strategy.”

The Blinkbox service will enable TalkTalk to launch a TV app.

“What we have is YouView and TalkTalk TV on set-top box. For a Freeview household, that’s great, they’re starting to pay for certain content and use functionality like catch-up on demand. What we want to accelerate is taking that experience out of home.” Harrison said.

Blinkbox cofounder and CEO Adrian Letts will join Harrison as managing director of TalkTalk TV, but the Blinkbox brand, including its name, will be dropped. The integration will allegedly happen over a period of time and Blinkbox will undergo a full rebrand in the near future.

TalkTalk has already added Netflix to its service, by the end of January it will be available to all of its customers. As more and more content goes mobile, broadband providers are looking to own that space, as well as the home. Multinational telecommunications service BT is currently in talks to buy EE, Britains largest mobile network, for £12.5bn.