TV Time, the favored TV and movie-tracking app whose pending shutdown has prompted more than 25,000 users to petition in opposition to its closure, is getting a reboot of types.
One of many app’s original founders, Antonio Pinto, says he’s creating a brand new TV present monitoring app, Bingers, which is able to try and rebuild one of the best options of TV Time whereas additionally addressing the problems that bothered him through the years.
Bingers will supply TV Time’s present customers a possible lifeline quickly after the unique app disappears from the app shops. It additionally provides the prevailing social neighborhood one other place to go to proceed discussing TV episodes, one thing that not all TV present monitoring apps supply. In keeping with information from app intelligence supplier Appfigures, TV Time has greater than 26.4 million lifetime installs, lots of these customers doubtlessly serving to seed the brand new app’s neighborhood.
Pinto, who is predicated in Paris, bought his app, then referred to as TVShow Time, to Whipclip (now Whip Media) in 2016, after the corporate promised it may develop the app’s person base considerably due to its Los Angeles ties. When he heard the app was being wound down as Whip Media shifted its focus to AI, Pinto mentioned he felt unhappy.
“Unhappy as a result of TV Time was a part of my life for thus a few years. And unhappy as a result of this neighborhood was like my different household. Studying the neighborhood reactions after every episode turned a ritual for me, and for a lot of others,” Pinto wrote in a blog post on the brand new Bingers web site.
“I made a decision to construct the brand new dwelling the place the TV Time neighborhood may go. I needed to rebuild all TV Time[‘s] nice options, but in addition repair every thing that all the time bothered me,” he mentioned.
Notably, the brand new Bingers app will tackle TV Time’s efficiency points, which regularly triggered the app to load slowly and made it costly to run. Pinto claims excessive server prices led to the shutdown, noting that its premium subscription plan solely lined about 10% of these bills because of the measurement of its neighborhood.
As a substitute, Bingers has been architected to maintain its server prices low, making it extra sustainable, Pinto claims. It is going to additionally enable the app to reply sooner when customers mark an episode as watched, even when tens of millions of others are connecting on the identical time.
The developer tells TechCrunch that the brand new app can be accessible on the App Retailer and Google Play by the tip of July 2026. Till then, the web site is collecting sign-ups for a waitlist that may alert customers when the brand new app is prepared for launch.
In fact, Bingers can even be capable of import information from customers’ TV Time archives, accessible by means of the app’s GDPR-compliant export tool earlier than its elimination from the app shops on July 15. By importing customers’ archives, Pinto says Bingers will be capable of recreate TV Time’s neighborhood feedback as nicely.
The archive import is already up and working on the Bingers web site, so your TV viewing historical past will already be accessible when the app launches on the app shops.
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