Resources · Trackers
TV Time Shut Down. Here's Where to Track TV Shows Now.
After more than a decade and upwards of 26 million lifetime installs, TV Time closed its doors in July 2026. If you were one of the people who logged every episode there, you have two questions: where did my data go, and what do I use now?
This guide answers both. It covers how to get your watch history out while that's still possible, what a tracker is actually for once you strip away the habit of logging, and an honest look at the remaining options — including ours.
What happened to TV Time
TV Time was owned by Whip Media, a company whose real business was never the consumer app. Whip Media sells content-performance data to studios and streamers. The app was, among other things, a very large panel of people voluntarily reporting what they watched — enormously valuable input for that business, but expensive to run as a product in its own right.
In 2026 the company redirected toward enterprise AI work, and the consumer app was retired. There was no acquisition, no handover, no successor app. Millions of watch histories simply became inaccessible on a fixed date.
That's worth sitting with for a second, because it explains something about this whole category: a tracker you don't control is a tracker you can lose. The lesson isn't "don't use trackers." It's "check whether you can get your data out before you put ten years into one."
First: get your data out
Before you pick a new home, try to retrieve your history. Under GDPR and similar regimes, companies operating in covered markets are generally required to provide a copy of personal data on request, and that obligation doesn't disappear the moment a product sunsets — the corporate entity still exists.
What that gets you, in practice, is a ZIP archive containing CSV files. Typically that means a watchlist, a watched-episode history, ratings, and any comments you left. It's plain text, it opens in any spreadsheet program, and it's yours.
Two honest caveats. First, export portals for retired products are often the first thing to break, so if the request form no longer responds, that avenue may already be closed. Second — and this catches people out — these exports usually identify shows by title string rather than by a stable database ID. "The Office" in a CSV could be the UK original or the US remake. Any tool that imports your history has to resolve those titles back to real records, and that resolution is never perfect. Expect to fix a handful of matches by hand no matter which service you move to.
If you still have the export, hold onto the ZIP. Don't delete it after importing somewhere. It's the only copy.
What a tracker is actually for
Most people who log episodes describe the appeal as some mix of memory and completionism — knowing you're four episodes into season two, seeing the year in review, not re-watching a pilot by accident.
Those are real. But they're the smallest part of the value, and they're the part that made TV Time replaceable. The bigger reason to track what you watch is that a list of what you're partway through is the only reliable input for telling you what's new.
Think about how you actually find out a new season dropped. Usually you don't. A streaming app surfaces it on its own home screen, weeks late, if that service happens to be the one you opened. Nothing tells you across services, because no streaming service can see the other five you pay for. If you follow creators on YouTube or Twitch, or keep a podcast queue, those live in yet another set of apps that don't talk to any of it.
A tracker that only records the past is a diary. A tracker that knows what you're watching and uses it to tell you what's coming is a guide. When you're comparing options below, that's the line worth watching for.
The remaining options
The people leaving TV Time have mostly scattered across a handful of services. Here's the shape of each.
Simkl
The most direct spiritual replacement, and where a large share of TV Time users landed. Tracks shows, movies and anime, offers importers from several other services, and has a generous free tier. The interface is dense and dated in places, but it does the core job and it does it broadly.
Trakt
The power-user option, and the backbone of the self-hosted media world — it integrates with Plex, Jellyfin, Kodi, Stremio and Infuse, so playback in those apps can scrobble automatically without you touching anything. Deep, well-documented API. The trade-off is that the meaningful features sit behind a paid tier, and the experience assumes you're comfortable wiring things together.
Serializd
The most social of the group — a Letterboxd-shaped experience for television, built around reviews, ratings and following other people's diaries. Lovely if the community aspect is what you liked about TV Time's comments. Thinner if you mainly wanted to know when things aired.
Letterboxd
Excellent, but films only. If your logging was mostly movies it's the obvious answer. If you were tracking series, it doesn't address the problem.
GuideStream TV
Ours, so read this with appropriate suspicion — but the design goal is the distinction drawn above. GuideStream TV treats shows, movies, YouTube channels, Twitch streamers, podcasts and live sports as the same kind of thing: sources you follow. They land in one feed and one alert system.
The practical difference is directional. Instead of you opening an app to record what you watched, the app pushes you when something you follow has something new — a new episode, a new upload, a stream going live, a game starting — with a link that opens it on the right service. There's also an alert for titles about to leave a service you pay for, which is the notification this category should have been sending all along and mostly doesn't.
Choosing between them
Rather than a scored comparison, three questions that tend to settle it:
Do you want a record, or do you want to be told? If logging itself is the pleasure — the stats, the diary, the completed-series count — Simkl or Serializd will make you happy. If logging was always a chore you tolerated because it was the only way to keep track, you want something alert-driven.
Does your watching live entirely inside streaming apps? If a meaningful share of your evening is YouTube, Twitch or podcasts, most trackers in this list have nothing to say about it, and you'll end up back in three apps. That gap is specifically what GuideStream TV was built to close.
Can you get your data out again? Ask this before you commit, not after. Check for a documented export before you import ten years of history. TV Time's users learned this the expensive way.
Moving your history
Whichever you choose, the mechanics are roughly the same. Request and download your archive as a ZIP. Unzip it and confirm the CSVs contain what you expect — watchlist and watched history at minimum. Create your new account, find the import option, and upload.
Then, and this is the step people skip: review the matches. Because of the title-string problem described above, some shows will land on the wrong record — remakes, international versions, and anything with a generic name are the usual casualties. Fixing twenty entries takes ten minutes and saves you a year of confusing recommendations.
Finally, keep the original ZIP somewhere safe. It cost you nothing to store and it's your only insurance the next time a service like this quietly winds down.
The wider point
TV Time's closure wasn't really about TV Time. It was a demonstration that the thing you built up — the record of what you watch, what you're partway through, who you follow — has real value, and that value doesn't have to sit with a company that can decide to stop.
Whatever you pick next, pick one that lets you leave.
GuideStream TV is coming to iPhone, Apple TV and Android. One feed for shows, movies, creators, podcasts and live sports — with an alert the moment anything you follow has something new. Join the waitlist and we'll tell you the day it's live.