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TV Time co-founder launches Bingers to revive the beloved TV tracking app
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A co-founder of the defunct TV tracking app TV Time has launched Bingers, a successor app that recreates its social features and lets users import their old viewing history.
For teams building consumer apps with large communities, the shutdown of TV Time by its owner Whip Media, despite over 26 million installs and a 28,000-signature petition, shows that an engaged user base alone cannot save a product when the parent company pivots strategy. Bingers' architectural choice to push library processing onto user devices rather than server-side is a direct response to the cost pressures that killed the original app.
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Bingers is built by Antonio Pinto, one of TV Time's original founders, after Whip Media shut down TV Time to focus on AI efforts instead.
The app lets users import data exported from TV Time via a GDPR-compliant tool that was available before TV Time's removal from app stores on July 15, 2026.
Bingers offloads heavy processing like viewing calendars and watchlists to users' devices rather than company servers, an architectural decision aimed at avoiding the cost issues that contributed to TV Time's closure.
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What elseif makes of it.
Whip Media shut down TV Time despite the app having been installed over 26.4 million times and a petition of more than 28,000 users asking to keep it alive through crowdfunding or subscriptions. The owner chose to redirect resources toward AI efforts, leaving a loyal community without a home. That a product with this level of traction was still considered expendable is a reminder that platform decisions are driven by parent-company strategy, not user metrics alone. Bingers, launched by original TV Time co-founder Antonio Pinto, attempts to recreate the social layer that distinguished TV Time from simpler trackers. Users can create profiles, comment on shows and movies with photos and GIFs, rate episodes, react with emojis, and vote on favorite characters. The app is available on both iOS and Android. Pinto framed the original TV Time as a product that had been neglected for years yet retained an active community, which he took as evidence the social model had enduring value. The most technically notable decision is Bingers' approach to data processing. Libraries are loaded on users' phones, shifting the computational burden for features like viewing calendars and watchlists away
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