TV Time creator builds successor app to preserve watch histories

TV Time will stop operating after July 15, 2026, and the app, website and user records will be removed after that date. Antonio Pinto, who co-founded the service as TVShow Time, is now building Bingers as a successor that would let people import their watch histories and keep the conversation around the shows they followed.

Pinto says he started TVShow Time in 2011 with Talal Mazroui, later brought on Frederic Ye and Michel Thiers, and watched the service grow to 1.5 million users before Whipclip, later renamed Whip Media, acquired it in 2016. He says the app eventually reached 2.5 million active users. Bingers says it is trying to rebuild the most popular TV Time features with a modern interface and a cheaper infrastructure, after Pinto concluded that TV Time’s server costs were so high that ads or a premium plan would not have covered even 10 percent of them.

The shutdown lands with unusual scale. TechCrunch reported that TV Time had more than 26.4 million lifetime installs and nearly 29,000 new downloads in the prior 30 days, a sign that the closure affects a large and still-active audience. Whip Media’s broader turn also helps explain the timing: the company was acquired by Blue Torch Capital in early 2025 and then shifted toward AI products, including Helix, an AI-native platform for media operations and analytics.

Users have pushed back quickly. A petition on Change.org called on the company to let the service be saved through crowdfunding or subscriptions, and other outlets said it drew more than 25,000 signatures. At the same time, rival services moved to offer escape routes. JustWatch launched a free migration tool that can import TV Time viewing history, watchlists and episode-tracking data, while TVmaze said it was building an importer to help former TV Time users preserve as much tracking history as possible before the service goes offline.

For longtime users, the deadline is not abstract. TV Time holds years of viewing logs, ratings, lists and community reactions, and those records will disappear with the service unless they are exported before July 15. Bingers is trying to prove that an online identity built around television habits can survive a platform shutdown, but the scramble around TV Time also shows how much personal and cultural memory can vanish when a popular app disappears.