A new app called Bingers has been launched to fill the void left by the closure of popular TV and movie tracking platform TV Time.
The app was created by Antonio Pinto, one of the original founders of TV Time. Bingers is said to be the main goal of bringing back TV Time’s popular tracking and community features in a modern way.
When TV Time was shut down, it had been installed more than 26.4 million times worldwide, and more than 28,000 users had signed an online petition asking for it not to be closed. However, Whip Media, the company that owned TV Time, decided to close the service to focus more on its AI work.
What can the Bingers App do?
There are three main parts to Bingers. These are tracking TV Shows and Movies that users are watching or want to watch in the future, discovering new content to watch, and using a social community where they can connect with other fans.
Users are also given the ability to mark episodes and movies they have watched, create a watchlist, receive notifications when new episodes are released, and see personalized recommendations.
Like TV Time, Bingers also allows you to post comments on shows and episodes, add photos and GIFs, rate episodes, express your thoughts with emojis, and vote for your favorite characters.
It also provides facilities to avoid seeing spoilers and read reviews and reactions from other fans.
TV Time data can be accessed by Bingers
Before TV Time was shut down, its users were given the opportunity to download their viewing history through a GDPR-compliant export tool.
By importing that archive into Bingers, users can retrieve the watch history and other data that was in TV Time.
A different architecture to reduce server costs
The main reason for the shutdown of TV Time was its high server costs. According to Antonio Pinto, the revenue generated from premium subscriptions and advertisements was not enough to cover even 10 percent of those costs.
To solve this problem, Bingers is designed to handle most of the processing of data such as the user’s library, viewing calendar, and watchlist on the user’s device.
This is expected to reduce the burden on the company’s servers and the cost of maintaining the app in the long term.
Initially, users will be given the opportunity to voluntarily contribute money to Bingers’ server costs. There are also plans to introduce another business model in the future, but the details of it have not been revealed yet.
The Bingers app is currently available for iPhone and Android devices on the App Store and Google Play Store. However, you cannot stream TV Shows or Movies through Bingers, and it is an app designed for content tracking and community discussions.
