When you look for a TV Time alternative, the real question isn't which one looks nicest. It's: am I going to lose years of tracking? Starting from scratch is what makes most people quit after two weeks. I ran the migration on my own account — here are the real numbers, including what didn't make it.
What my TV Time export contained
A CSV file obtained through a data export (GDPR) request. Nothing exotic — it's what everyone gets:
- 136 tracked shows
- 4,671 watched-episode rows, each with its watch date
- 322 movies
What carried over with zero effort
Today in my WatchTrail account: 4,633 watched episodes with their dates, 323 movies, and 141 shows (I added 5 since the migration). Statuses weren't in the export: they were recomputed from my actual progress — 100 shows completed, 39 dropped, 2 in progress.
The dates matter most, and that's the first thing I'd check with any service: without them, your diary, your statistics and your yearly recap restart from zero even if the episodes are ticked.
The gap: 38 rows, under 1%
4,671 rows in the export, 4,633 episodes in the account. The gap comes from how metadata databases split things: double episodes merged on one side and separate on the other, specials numbered differently, seasons reorganized after the fact. No tool hits 100% — be wary of any that promises it.
What does prevent real losses is the matching method: every show is resolved by its ID (TheTVDB's, mapped to TMDB), not by its title. That's the difference between losing three shows and losing thirty: titles change between dubbed and original, between a reboot and the original, between two spellings — IDs don't.
What you will NOT get back (know it beforehand)
The GDPR export contains your watch history. Not the social layer. Concretely, you lose:
- your TV Time posts and comments
- your friend list and interactions
- your TV Time badges and rewards
That's the real loss from the shutdown, and no migration repairs it. Better to accept it now than to discover it afterwards.
How long it takes
The export takes minutes if the option is still available in your account — up to a month if you go through a formal support request. The import itself takes about three minutes: drop the CSV, wait, done. It's safely re-runnable with no duplicates, so if it cuts out, just run it again.
Three checks to run right after
- The import summary counter: it shows rows imported out of the total — that's where you see your real gap
- Open two or three shows at random: the right seasons should be ticked, not just the show marked as watched
- Check your calendar: if it's empty while you track ongoing shows, statuses weren't recomputed
If those three look right, your migration worked — everything else (notifications, where to watch, statistics) fills itself in afterwards.