Blink
Blink Video Doorbell
- Wi-Fi
Verified September 2026
Amazon owns both Blink and Ring, and this doorbell is the budget half of that family — RRP £49.99 against the Ring Battery Doorbell's £79.99, though new stock of this 2nd-gen ASIN has currently sold out on Amazon UK and it's only listed via the Used Buy Box (around £23 at last check, condition and price will vary). Battery life is the strong point: Blink claims up to two years per set of 2x AA lithium batteries, swapped in seconds, versus Ring's sealed battery needing a USB-C recharge every 6-12 months. Night vision is infrared-only, in keeping with a spec sheet that reads a generation behind. In Home Assistant both integrations are cloud-only with no live view, just stored clips and sensors — the real choice is price versus polish: cheaper and more DIY here, pricier and marginally smoother with Ring.
In Home Assistant
| Control | Type | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Camera | Camera | Snapshot-only feed, not a live stream — image is stale until a trigger-camera service is called to force a new capture. |
| Alarm control | Alarm control panel | System-wide Sync Module arm/disarm; arm-home is unimplemented and has no effect. |
| Motion | Binary sensor | Motion detected flag; only fires while the Sync Module is armed, so disarmed cameras won't report motion at all. |
| Battery | Binary sensor | Low-battery flag for wired-battery cameras — not exposed for mains-powered models. |
| Signal strength | Sensor | Camera Wi-Fi signal, refreshed only when an image request is made rather than on a regular poll interval. |
The camera entity is snapshot-only and stays stale until something calls a trigger-camera service — there's no polling loop, so an automation or a manual button press has to explicitly request a fresh image before it's worth looking at. Motion events only fire while the Sync Module is armed, which the alarm entity controls via arm-away/disarm; arm-home is a no-op in the current integration and does nothing. Login is the fragile part: HA's config flow supports both the email-approval and SMS-PIN 2FA paths, but there are recurring reports of breakage when Blink's backend API changes, and cases where the SMS code arrives with no PIN field rendered to enter it, forcing a full re-auth of the integration.
Specs
- power
- battery (2x AA lithium) or wired (2K+ generation)
- storage
- cloud only via Sync Module, no on-device storage
- streaming
- cloud-only, no local/RTSP path; Sync Module Core required for HA entities
- resolution
- 1440p (2nd gen model)
- battery life
- up to 2 years per set of 2x AA lithium batteries, per Blink's official estimate (blinkforhome.com); actual life varies with motion volume, WiFi signal strength and temperature
- night vision
- infrared, standard across Blink's camera and doorbell line; exact IR range in metres not published by Blink
- subscription
- Blink Subscription Plus from £8/month (unlimited devices, 60-day cloud storage) or £2.50/month single-device Basic tier