TV Time Alternatives: What to Use After the Shutdown

TV Time shut down on July 15, 2026. Parent company Whip Media said it was “no longer sustainable to continue operating the service as a free app, and there was not enough demand for a paid app” (TechCrunch). The app was removed from both the App Store and Google Play (MacRumors). All personal user data was permanently deleted. The GDPR export tool at gdpr.tvtime.com is gone. If you were one of the 26 million users who had the app installed and did not export your data before the deadline, your watch history cannot be recovered (Tech Times).

If you are looking for a replacement, the first question is not “which tracker should I use next?” It is whether you want another tracker at all.

What TV Time actually did

TV Time was an episode tracker. It logged every show you watched, marked episodes as seen, pushed reminders when new seasons dropped, and built a community around shared viewing habits. It was good at bookkeeping. Its recommendations, when they existed, leaned on community averages and trending, not on a model of your specific taste.

When the shutdown was announced, the alternatives named in coverage were Serializd, Trakt, Simkl, and BetaSeries. All are trackers. They will import your data and resume the logging loop TV Time left behind. But if you used TV Time partly to discover what to watch next, a tracker replacement will not solve the recommendation question.

The decision: tracker or recommendation app

This is the fork in the road. Trackers and recommendation apps solve different problems.

Your priority	What to use	Why
“I want to log every episode I watch”	Serializd or Trakt	Both import TV Time data and resume episode tracking
“I want to discover what to watch next”	NextWatchTV	Match score, completed-series filter, service filtering
“I want both tracking and recommendations”	Trakt + NextWatchTV	Use Trakt for logging, NextWatchTV for discovery
“I want a free tracker that imports TV Time data”	Serializd or Simkl	Both support TV Time import; both are free
“I want a tracker built by TV Time’s co-founder”	Bingers	Launched August 2026 by Antonio Pinto, supports TV Time archive import

For a detailed feature comparison between NextWatchTV, Serializd, and Trakt, see the TV Time alternatives comparison page.

The tracker options

Serializd is a free, TV-only social tracker. It imports data from TV Time and Trakt (Serializd). It is ad-supported, and its Apple privacy label shows Usage Data used to track you across apps (App Store). Its privacy policy page was not publicly accessible as of August 2026. If you want a direct tracker-style replacement for TV Time’s tracking and community features, Serializd is the closest match.

Trakt is a feature-rich tracker with media-center scrobbling, cross-service watch-now filtering, and a large community. VIP at $6/month or $60/year removes ads and adds advanced filters. Trakt states it “never sells your personal information or data” but its privacy policy discloses sharing identifiers and inferences with third parties for business purposes (Trakt VIP, Trakt privacy policy). Trakt does not offer a personal match score or a completed-series filter.

Bingers launched in August 2026, built by TV Time co-founder Antonio Pinto. It supports importing TV Time archives. It is free with no in-app purchases at launch, with plans for a freemium model. Its privacy policy is not clearly published yet. Bingers is the newest option and the most direct spiritual successor to TV Time, but it is early in its lifecycle.

Simkl tracks TV, movies, and anime with auto-scrobbling. It has a dedicated TV Time import page at simkl.com/apps/import/tvtime/. Free with ads; VIP at approximately $3/month. Like the other trackers, it does not offer a personal match score or a completed-series filter.

Showly and SeriesGuide are open-source alternatives. Showly is a Trakt companion (GPL-3.0, ad-free). SeriesGuide is Android-only (Apache-2.0, no ads, no account required). Neither supports direct TV Time import; both work through Trakt as a backend. If privacy is a priority and you want an open-source tracker, these are worth considering.

The recommendation option

NextWatchTV is not a tracker. It does not import watch-history data. It does not log episodes. It does not compete with these apps on tracking. It competes on the question TV Time never fully answered: “what finished show should I start tonight?”

NextWatchTV surfaces completed series filtered to your subscribed streaming services, each with a 0-100 Match Score computed against your individual profile. It has no ads, no data selling, and no cross-app tracking at any tier. The free tier includes discovery and match scores with limited recommendation volume. Paid plans start at $1.99/month or $14.99/year, with a $49.99 lifetime option.

If you have a TV Time export and want to preserve your viewing log, import it into Serializd, Trakt, Bingers, or Simkl first. Then use NextWatchTV alongside it for recommendations.

For a side-by-side feature comparison, see the TV Time alternatives comparison page or the best TV recommendation apps roundup.

Why the TV Time shutdown matters beyond TV Time

TV Time was free and ad-supported, and it had 26 million users (TechCrunch). It still could not sustain itself. The shutdown is a reminder that free apps do not depend on the same revenue dynamic as subscription-funded apps. When the business model depends on ad revenue and the ad revenue cannot cover costs, the service disappears and the data goes with it.

A subscription-funded app does not depend on the same ad-revenue dynamic, though no product is guaranteed to last forever. NextWatchTV’s revenue comes from subscribers, not from monetizing attention. If the product works for users, the business sustains itself. There is no advertising business that can pull the rug out.

The short version

If you want another tracker, Serializd and Trakt both import TV Time data. Bingers is the newest option, built by a TV Time co-founder. If you want a recommendation app that tells you what finished show to start tonight, filtered to your services and scored against your taste, NextWatchTV is built for that. You can use both: a tracker for logging, a recommendation app for discovery.

For the full feature comparison, see the TV Time alternatives comparison page. For the broader app landscape, see the best TV recommendation apps roundup or the head-to-head comparison page. For pricing, see the pricing page. For common questions, see the FAQ.