WatchTrail launched in July to take in TV Time's orphans. The essentials were there: track your shows, import your history, rate your films. It has grown a lot since — here is what landed, including what had to be repaired.
Nine games, free and account-free
The biggest addition of the summer. The starting point: a tracker gets visited when you tick an episode, so two or three times a week. A daily game is a reason to come back every day.
- The Daily Challenge — a mystery show, six guesses, a different type of clue after each miss. Two modes, show or character: playing either keeps the same streak alive
- The Grid — one show per cell, at the intersection of two criteria
- Higher or lower, Guess the year, Put them in order — three arcade games about catalogues
- The spoiler-free Quiz and Ready for the return — two games drawing ONLY from episodes you have ticked
- Which character are you — five personality tests, shareable result
The two games built from your history deserve a note: they cannot be copied elsewhere. Questions come from your own tracking, and the rule is absolute — the title of an episode you have not seen cannot appear anywhere, neither in the question nor as a wrong answer. An episode title alone can spoil.
Extended universes, with their continuities
19 official sagas, 264 titles checked one by one: MCU, Star Wars, Alien, X-Men, Middle-earth, Wizarding World, DC, Matrix, Jurassic Park, Terminator, Predator, Rocky and more. Each can be ticked in chronological or release order, and progress follows your real tracking.
This summer's addition is continuities. Some sagas are not a straight line: the Fox-era X-Men and Deadpool & Wolverine do not share a world, Middle-earth reads in branches. Those universes are now split into sections, and titles outside the main continuity are marked optional — they do not count towards your percentage.
What you no longer lose
One flaw was reported and deserved the fix: unfollowing a show erased your rating, your favourite flag and your custom poster. That was brutal, and not what TV Time did.
Unfollowing now FILES a show away instead of destroying it: it leaves your library and your feed, but your rating, your ticked episodes and your reviews stay. Follow it again some day and everything comes back.
The TV Time export, as is
The file TV Time used to send on a GDPR request, before its shutdown, is an archive of 53 files, and until now you had to find the right one. No longer: drop the ZIP as is, we sort it out. On a real 4,673-episode export, the import took 225 seconds and recovered 4,606 episodes — the 67 missing are specials that TheTVDB counts and TMDB does not, plus duplicates from TV Time itself.
And one thing that used to be lost: the shows you followed without having started them. They come back as « to watch ». On that export, that was 24 more shows. Movies are read too, watched and to-watch: they live in another file of the archive, without identifiers, so they are matched by title and year.
Also, the account confirmation link now works from any device — sign up on the computer, click on the phone — and if it has expired, we tell you instead of sending you back to a silent form.
Statuses finally tell the truth
A show could appear as 'not watched in a while' when there was nothing to watch: the count included ANNOUNCED episodes, next season included, even without an air date. Dune: Prophecy counted 14 episodes when 6 had aired.
The rule is now plain: counting is done on what has AIRED. Up to date with everything released = finished. A show goes back to 'watching' when episodes COME OUT, never when they are announced.
Small things you see every day
- Page addresses carry their title: /show/1399-game-of-thrones instead of a bare number
- The library sorts: recent, A–Z, last watched, release date
- 'Mark all watched' ticks episodes immediately, without reloading the page
- 'More like this' finally suggests relevant titles — Game of Thrones used to point at completely unrelated shows
And a mascot
The site had grey icons everywhere. It now has a character: a popcorn bucket living in the empty states, on the game cards, on the error pages, and in your browser tab.
It also brings avatars. Ten so far: the bucket itself, free for everyone, then nine archetypes — the critic, the detective, the witch, the pirate, the astronaut, the vampire, the knight, the zombie, and a last one reserved for 5,000 episodes. Each unlocks with a badge, so by watching.
One choice is worth explaining: these avatars are archetypes, never characters from existing shows. That was the original idea and it was dropped — a recognisable avatar of a protected character stays a derivative work, even redrawn as popcorn. Same mechanic, content that is ours.
What has not changed
Free, ad-free, no data resale. Your data stays exportable in one click and your account deletable without writing to us. That was July's promise, and it holds.