u/itsmahmood_dev

I built and launched a mobile app for people who wanted to keep their TV Time history after TV Time shut down.

The app imports their export, so their shows, episodes, watch dates, ratings, and comments stay with them instead of disappearing with the old app.

I have a small number of early users from Reddit, but I am stuck on the next part: reaching the people who would genuinely benefit from it without becoming annoying or spamming every TV-related community.

For a consumer app with a very specific audience, what channels would you test first?

Would you focus on Reddit communities, TikTok/Instagram content, App Store optimisation, SEO around TV Time exports, or something else?

I’m building this alone, so I want to spend time on the few channels most likely to work rather than posting everywhere.

1.3.0 is out on the App Store and Google Play. This is the community release — the one I said was coming back in July. It took much longer than I told you, and I'm sorry for the wait.

WHAT'S IN IT

Comments are live. Comment on episodes, films and shows, reply to people, like, and see what everyone else thought. Not just your imported TV Time comments any more.

Ratings and character votes are shared. Rate an episode or vote for your favourite character and you can see how your vote sits against everyone else's.

Profiles and following. Follow people, and get a profile carrying your favourites, your lists and your stats.

Sign in with Apple, Google or an email address.

YOUR OLD TV TIME NAME IS TAKEN FOR YOU

If your import carried a TV Time username, OpenTV claims it as your handle automatically when you sign in. You only get asked to pick one if somebody else already has it.

ALL OF IT IS OPTIONAL

Skip the community and nothing changes — same tracker, same import, still fully offline, and you won't be asked twice. There is no account requirement anywhere in the app.

WHAT MY SERVER DOES NOT HAVE

There is no watch-history table on it. None. Your episodes, your dates, your rewatches — none of that is uploaded, and the schema has nowhere to put it. What the server holds is the community half: comments, ratings, who follows whom, and the shelves you choose to publish. If it vanished tomorrow you'd keep your complete history and lose only other people's comments.

THE FIXES YOU REPORTED

Episode synopses are back

The fake next episode is gone. TheTVDB lists a season the moment it's announced and those episodes have no air date yet; my check only skipped episodes dated in the future, so a missing date slipped through and the app offered you an episode nobody has made. That's Foundation's season 4 and the S3E1 on finished shows.

Also: countdowns show just the number, watched films stop reappearing in the watch list, long titles shrink to fit instead of being chopped, titles can be selected and copied, and films now have the same artwork picker shows have.

WHAT'S NOT IN THIS ONE

Private profiles. Anything you publish is public for now — worth knowing before you publish.

Images and GIFs in new comments. Your imported TV Time ones still display; you can't attach a new one yet.

Reconnecting your old TV Time friends. Your export's friend list is preserved and the matching is built, but there's no screen for it yet. It's next, and I'd rather ship it properly than half-show it.

The community is brand new, which means it's empty. Someone has to comment first.

Bugs and feedback right here as always. Thanks for using OpenTV 💛

1.2.0 is out on both the App Store and Google Play. This is the biggest change under the hood since launch, and it's worth explaining properly.

WHY YOUR SHOWS LOOKED SLIGHTLY WRONG

TV Time was built on a database called TheTVDB. OpenTV was built on a different one, TMDB — the free option most trackers use. They disagree about a lot of things, and the disagreements landed on you: episodes numbered differently, seasons split differently, air dates off by a day.

Anime was the worst of it. TMDB often files an entire long-running series as one giant season, so imported watches landed on the wrong episodes and your progress looked shifted or wrong.

WHAT CHANGED

OpenTV now pulls shows and episodes from TheTVDB — the same source TV Time used. Your library should line up with what you remember.

• Anime seasons are split properly again, and watches land on the right episodes instead of being shifted.
• Episode numbering matches what TV Time showed you, because it's coming from the same place.
• Film matching went from about 73% to nearly everything, using your watch dates to tell apart films that share a title.
• Real characters and cast instead of a list of voice actors.
• Browser-extension exports import now. If you used one of the community scripts to pull your data instead of the official GDPR ZIP, that format works.

"AREN'T YOU WORRIED THEY'LL SHUT DOWN TOO?"

Someone asked me this directly, and it's a fair question — TheTVDB is owned by the same company that shut down TV Time.

It turned out not to be a choice I had to make. TheTVDB is primary, and if that ever stops working the app falls back to TMDB automatically. Nothing breaks either way.

And the deeper answer hasn't changed: everything is already on your phone. Metadata is cached locally as you browse, so your library keeps working with no network at all. If every database on the internet went dark tomorrow, your history is still sitting in a file you own.

ONE THING WORTH DOING AFTER YOU UPDATE

Settings → App → Refresh all metadata. That re-pulls your library from TheTVDB and fixes up anything that imported under the old numbering. It takes a while on a big library — leave it running.

ALSO IN 1.2.0

Lists you can actually use (create, rename, delete, reorder by dragging), sharing, iPad support, and a pile of smaller fixes.

Next up: six languages — Arabic, French, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese (Brazil). Already built, on its way to both stores.

As always, bugs and feedback right here. Thanks for using OpenTV 💛

I've been going through the TV Time GDPR export and noticed something worth sharing about the photos.

The export doesn't actually contain your images. For your profile picture and any photos you posted in comments, it only stores links (URLs) pointing to TV Time's servers — not the real image files. Now that TV Time is shut down, those servers are gone, so the links lead to nothing.

What that means:

• If you imported your export into an app while TV Time was still online, the app could follow those links and save the real images onto your device before they went dark — so you still have them.
• If you never imported anywhere, or imported after the servers went down, those photos are just dead links now. As far as I can tell, they're gone.

The good news: the rest of your data — shows, episodes, ratings, comment text, lists — is real content stored inside the export, not links. So all of that is safe and recoverable. If you saved your export ZIP you're set; if you didn't, Whip Media's support (whipmedia.freshdesk.com) can still send you your data.

So it's really just the uploaded photos that are at risk, and only for people who didn't get them into an app in time.

Has anyone here managed to recover their old TV Time images another way — a cache, a web archive, anything? I've hit dead ends everywhere I've looked, and I'd genuinely love to be wrong.

TL;DR: TV Time's export only saved links to your photos, not the photos themselves. Those links are dead now. If an app pulled them in while TV Time was still up, they're saved; if not, they're likely gone. Your history/ratings/comments are real data in the export, so those are fine.

A lot of people wonder why their data changes after importing it from TV Time into apps like Sofa Time, Serializd, and others.

The main reason is that these apps don't use the same metadata source.

- TV Time uses TheTVDB as its primary database.
- Most other tracking apps use The Movie Database (TMDb).

Because these databases are maintained independently, they often have different:

- Show and episode artwork
- Episode titles
- Season ordering (especially for specials)
Release dates
- TV show or movie IDs
This is why, after importing your data, you might notice:

- Different posters or backdrops
- Different episode names
- Missing TV shows, movies, or specials
- Episodes matched incorrectly or not matched at all

The import itself usually isn't the problem. The issue is that the app has to match your watch history from one database (TheTVDB) to another (TMDb), and those databases don't always have identical information.

Unfortunately, there's no perfect solution unless both apps use the same metadata source or provide manual matching for unmatched entries.

A lot of people wonder why their data changes after importing it from TV Time into apps like Sofa Time, Serializd, and others.

The main reason is that these apps don't use the same metadata source.

- TV Time uses TheTVDB as its primary database.
- Most other tracking apps use The Movie Database (TMDb).

Because these databases are maintained independently, they often have different:

- Show and episode artwork
- Episode titles
- Season ordering (especially for specials)
Release dates
- TV show or movie IDs
This is why, after importing your data, you might notice:

- Different posters or backdrops
- Different episode names
- Missing TV shows, movies, or specials
- Episodes matched incorrectly or not matched at all

The import itself usually isn't the problem. The issue is that the app has to match your watch history from one database (TheTVDB) to another (TMDb), and those databases don't always have identical information.

Unfortunately, there's no perfect solution unless both apps use the same metadata source or provide manual matching for unmatched entries.