TV Time is gone. Here's what's left.
The service shut down on 15 July 2026 and took the watch history with it. Whether you can recover yours comes down to one question: did you save an export file before the lights went out?
Straight answer first. If you have an export ZIP, you can import it here in a couple of minutes and it's free. If you don't, the data is unrecoverable — not by us, not by anyone. The servers that held it are switched off. Anyone promising to restore it is guessing.
If you saved an export
Both the GDPR data export and the community export ZIPs that circulated
before the shutdown are readable. You want the .zip as you
downloaded it — no need to unpack it.
- Install TV Tracker, or just open the web app — uploading a ZIP is easier from a computer.
- Create a free account, or sign in with Google or Apple.
- Go to Settings → Import data.
- Pick TV Time (export ZIP), or leave Auto-detect on — it recognises the format either way.
- Upload the ZIP and wait for matching against TMDB.
- Check the review screen, fix any ambiguous matches, then Import selected.
Watched episodes come across too, not just the list of shows, so your progress bars pick up where TV Time left off.
If you didn't save an export
Then the history is lost, and the honest advice is to stop looking for a recovery trick and rebuild the part you actually use. In practice that is a much smaller job than it sounds: most people actively follow a couple of dozen shows, not the hundreds in their lifetime history.
- Search each show and add it — the search is fast and covers films too.
- Open a show, tick the seasons you've finished. A whole season marks in one tap rather than episode by episode.
- Anything you were mid-way through, set the last episode you watched and the next-up calculation takes over from there.
One consolation: you get to leave behind the shows you abandoned in 2019 and never want to see in a list again.
Coming from another tracker in the meantime?
Plenty of people bounced to a second service after the shutdown and are now moving again. Those exports work too: Trakt, IMDb, Letterboxd, Showly, and Refract / TV Time Out. See all import options.
Is TV Tracker actually a replacement?
For some of what TV Time did, yes — and it's worth being clear about the rest, because you'll find out in a day anyway.
What you get
- One watchlist for shows and films
- An airing calendar — what's next and when
- Episode progress, one tap to mark watched
- A whole-season drop arrives as one notification
- A real web app, no install needed
- 27 interface languages
- Free — no ads, no subscription, no data selling
What it doesn't do
- No social feed, comments or friends
- No ratings or reviews
- No automatic scrobbling from streaming services
- No watch-time statistics page
- It doesn't play video — it's a tracker, not a streaming app
If the community was the part you miss most, Trakt is the closer fit and we'd rather say so.
Common questions
Why did TV Time shut down?
The operator wound the service down and deleted user data rather than keeping it running. From a user's point of view the cause matters less than the lesson: export your library from any tracker you rely on, including this one.
Can I export out of TV Tracker later?
Your library syncs to your account and you can delete it outright from account deletion. If you want a portable copy of your data, ask at support@tv-tracker.uk — after watching a service evaporate, wanting a way out before you commit is a fair request rather than an awkward one.
My export ZIP won't import.
Send it to support@tv-tracker.uk and say it came from TV Time. Several different ZIP layouts went around before the shutdown and a failing file is the quickest way for us to support one more.