TV Time Is Shutting Down — Its Founder Is Building ‘Bingers’ to Save Your Watch History and Community

If you’re one of the millions of people who religiously track every TV episode you watch, you’ve probably heard the bad news by now. TV Time — the popular app that let you log shows, rate episodes, and discuss plot twists with a global community of fellow binge-watchers — is shutting down. But here’s the good news: the original founder is building a replacement, and it’s called Bingers.

Antonio Pinto, who created the app back when it was called TVShow Time and sold it to Whipclip (now Whip Media) in 2016, announced that he’s building a new TV tracking app that will do everything TV Time did — and fix the problems that made the original unsustainable.

“Sad because TV Time was part of my life for so many years. And sad because this community was like my other family,” Pinto wrote in a blog post announcing Bingers. “I decided to build the new home where the TV Time community could go.”

Why TV Time Is Shutting Down

The shutdown was first announced earlier this month when Whip Media revealed it was pivoting its focus to AI-powered licensing and analytics tools. The company said the TV Time app — which had more than 26.4 million lifetime installs according to data from Appfigures — no longer fit its strategic direction. The decision sparked an immediate backlash from users, with more than 25,000 fans signing a Change.org petition to save the app.

But Pinto says the real issue went deeper than a corporate pivot. He claims that TV Time’s server costs were simply too high for its business model to sustain. The app’s premium subscription plan, he notes, only covered about 10% of those expenses — a ratio that made long-term viability impossible regardless of who owned it.

Running a social network at scale is expensive. Every time millions of users mark an episode as watched, rate a season, or post a comment, the servers have to process, store, and serve that data. TV Time’s architecture wasn’t built to handle those costs efficiently, and the gap between revenue and expenses only widened as the user base grew.

Enter Bingers: A Phonenix From the Ashes

Rather than watch the community disappear, Pinto decided to rebuild. Bingers is being designed from the ground up with cost efficiency as a core principle. Pinto claims the new architecture will keep server costs low while delivering faster load times — even when millions of users are connecting simultaneously to discuss the latest episode of House of the Dragon or Stranger Things.

The app will be available on the App Store and Google Play by the end of July 2026. In the meantime, the Bingers website is collecting sign-ups for a waitlist, and more importantly, it’s already accepting data imports from TV Time users.

How to Save Your TV Time Data

TV Time is being removed from app stores on July 15, 2026. That means if you haven’t exported your data yet, now is the time to act. The app offers a GDPR-compliant export tool at gdpr.tvtime.com that lets you download your complete watch history, including ratings, reviews, and community comments.

Here’s the workflow:

1. Visit the TV Time GDPR self-service portal before July 15 and request your data export
2. Download the archive when it’s ready (this can take a few hours depending on how much data you’ve accumulated)
3. Head over to bingers.app and import your archive directly
4. Pinto says the import tool will recreate not just your viewing history but also the community comments from your favorite shows

That last part is the real magic. One of TV Time’s most beloved features was the episode discussion threads — the ability to read what other fans thought the moment a new episode dropped. Bingers aims to preserve those conversations by importing the raw comment data from your archive, so your history with the community doesn’t vanish when the app goes dark.

What This Says About the TV Tracking Space

TV Time’s shutdown and the rapid emergence of Bingers highlights something interesting about how people watch television in 2026. Despite the rise of algorithm-driven recommendations from Netflix, Max, and Disney+, millions of viewers still want a third-party space to log, rate, and discuss what they’re watching — independent of the platforms that produce the content.

This makes sense when you think about it. Streaming platforms want you to keep watching their content, not stop to write a review or browse what your friends are watching. A dedicated tracking app gives you ownership over your viewing history in a way that no single streaming service can. You can track shows across The Last of Us on HBO Max, Yellowstone on Paramount+, and the latest anime on Crunchyroll — all in one place.

The community aspect is equally important. In an era where social media feels increasingly fractured and algorithm-driven, a focused space where people gather specifically to talk about television has genuine appeal. TV Time had that. Bingers aims to preserve it.

The Bigger Picture: What Happens When Your Favorite App Shuts Down

TV Time’s shutdown is a case study in a broader problem in the app economy: what happens when the company behind your favorite service decides to move on? Whip Media’s pivot to AI isn’t unique — across the tech industry, companies are reassessing their product portfolios and cutting features that don’t align with AI-focused strategies.

For users, the risk is losing not just a tool but a digital history. Five years of episode logging, ratings, and community interaction — gone, unless you export before the deadline. The fact that Pinto is building Bingers is somewhat unusual. Most of the time, when a popular app shuts down, the data disappears and there’s no successor. The TV Time community is getting a rare second chance.

What’s Next for Bingers

Pinto hasn’t announced specific monetization plans for Bingers yet, but the cost-efficient architecture suggests the app won’t need to chase millions of subscribers to stay afloat. A smaller, sustainable model with a loyal user base may be the smarter play after watching TV Time collapse under its own server costs.

The waitlist is open now at bingers.app, and the app is targeting a late July launch on iOS and Android. For the 26 million people who have used TV Time over the years — and for anyone who’s ever wanted a better way to track what they watch — Bingers might just be the fresh start the community needed.

And if you’re looking for something new to track when the app launches, there’s always Game of Thrones — still one of the most rewatched and discussed series in TV history.