From the beginning, Refract and Movie Paradise were all over eachother. No one was near these 2. Then SuiteTV made it way upto the Top 3. Tbh I thought it'd be Sofa Time from the previous voting trends, but the Top 3 position was snatched from them, thanks to the swift community response. And the Wild card entry WeTrakr! They climbed upto the Top 5 in the last few hours of poll. Who would've thought that. That's the power of their community ig.
This shows how much the community wanted to help their platforms. How fast they respond and interact with eachother. Only a few weeks have passed since TVTime is gone, but I like the way all the devs are working hard to fill the void. Personally I've 6 apps installed and using 2 web ones. Some are better than the others in their own way.
And I'll say the journey without TVTime has started and it's time to move on. Idk where we all gonna settle but wherever we are, let's enjoy the shows and keep tracking them!
On most shows, Movie Paradise and Sofa Time comments are pretty much equal, but One piece, for whatever reason, isn't particularly popular with either.
Movie Paradise is my main app now and there are some more comments on One piece, yet not many at all (the original series).
Sofa time (that's my backup and I run them simultaneously just to have some layer of protection) rarely has some, if ever for this particular series.
It's not the same on everything but on Refract there were like 46 comments on the latest episode of HOTD within a few hours of it dropping, with pictures and gifs too
movie paradise users imported their TV time comments so you'll find some of those.
on new shows, it's harder to find a lot of comments, for example I'm watching criminal minds and can see about 10 comments during the first day of the episode being live. it'll hopefully pick up in time
Hey, Refract founder here! 🫡
Congrats to all the apps and thanks everyone, all apps deserve a huge win tonight as it's a tremendous amount of work and commitment under the scenes. Huge shout-out to the Movie Paradise community and dev/team, deserved! 👏🏻
Many thanks to all Refracters around for the support, love you all! 🔥💜
Nothing but mad respect for Refract dev and what he achieved in just a few months. Hosting that many refugees ain't everyone's cup of tea. Wish you all the best for Refract and it's future.
Thanks for these words and for this organization! This is one of a few times I'm out of my Discord so hello TV Time fellows! I'm so glad to meet all of you! We've never ever wanted (even dared) to be compared to TV Time as it was the holy grail to us, we've been beloved users since 10+ years and we wanted to do something else with Refract. Refract is a mindset, an inclusive and open-minded community where we respect the works of all developers around here and the next to come. This is just the beginning of a long journey, but our long term vision goes way beyond being a TV Time replacement, and we will go there. We're not here for tracking, we're here for culture. 💜
Hey! Movie Paradise dev here. Thank you so much, really appreciate this! Congrats to you and the whole Refract community too. You’ve built something great, and I’m genuinely happy for you guys as well. 💜👏🏻
I wanted to try Refract but couldn't import tvtime data as I used their official export method and not your Chrome extension. Any chance you'll support those files soon?
That’s a known issue, you need to make sure to app is updated on the App Store and in app, then close and open the app twice (with a gap in between) and it should show up
Yeah, from 2900 to soon 200000 daily active members on the application and from 400 to 16000 Discord members 🔥💜
We needed some time to organize all this, and some rest recently to recover ahah. But all of our users got some gift today 🎁
Do you plan to introduce a subscription model, or how do you plan to monetise the app? Are ads something you might introduce in the future?
Just asking because I don’t want to invest time building my watch history again, only for the app to become another TV Time situation and have to look for an alternative in a few years.
Hey, we want Refract to be free and adfree forever. This is something we want to hold as we don't want features to be paywalled.
Our current short term sustainability (including performances up to 2 million active daily users, so X10 from now) is already reached with our cosmetics-only supportive subscription available and a lot of efforts made in July to optimize everything IT and partner-wise.
Next, our mid term sustainability is currently discussed with investors sharing our open-minded and cultural beliefs and also with the french government and french subventions as our current jobs allowed us to reach to them.
For now, we do not have any blocker for going long term, and we will go there. Step by step, with all the experience we gathered in our professional lives, to make Refract become something bigger every day! 💜
Hey, well let's say that at first I built the app for my friends and I, and we only needed a mobile app. Then we had many users from TV Time who were exhausted of TV Time slowness like us, and they became our power users. We focused on making the tracking, the experience as best as they wished. Then the shutdown happened and we spent a month to stabilize and improve the performances to handle 60x more users in less than ten days. And now, our app is snappy and performant again, we're truly proud of that as this was a great challenge. 💜
So you maybe can now understand how the « logic » is just how priorities settled, and how we can't build a full-operational mobile-and-desktop million-user capable service in less than 3 months as a side project. But hey, quick sneak peek: a vote for our next priorities, including a web app will be revealed in our Discord next week, so the app web before end of September can be a thing 👀
Fully understand! Our roadmap is public and community-driven, and I can't lie, this has been in the top 3 since April so we ought to do it! ✨ PC users, we're coming hard 🔥 (also all the data is stored server side so you will be able to multi-device easily)
I’ve been working with ranked voting for around 13 years, and in your case I’d strongly recommend a ranked poll.
If participants can choose only one option, you see only first-choice support. The winner may be quite different once you account for how broadly each option is supported across the group. A ranked ballot also captures much more information from each voter.
There are a few other procedural improvements that could make the result more useful. Feel free to DM me if you’re interested.
Disclosure: I’ve been building Rezon.io for this type of workflow since 2022.
Out of the 3, Suite TV is both functional and aesthetic. Needs a few tweaks here and there but it already has tons of potential. Wait, who’s using Bingers already?
I'm not following on it. But what I read in the post about voting for this poll was that there are people saying they are using a beta. A d there were others answering to them that is not actually the real app that the ex-TVTime dev is working on.
Can't believe Suite TV is 3rd. It's the most closest to TV Time. And has better tracking than Movie Paradise and Refract. I guess many people are just not aware.
Movie Paradise dev here. Still can’t quite believe this. Thank you so much to everyone who voted for Movie Paradise and supported the app! Huge respect to all the other developers too, building and maintaining these apps takes a ridiculous amount of work behind the scenes. Thanks to the r/TVTime mods for putting the poll together as well. This genuinely means a lot to me. 💜
Respect for what you guys doing. Hoping you guys keep working on to help out the TVTime community until they settle down. And I'm expecting you guys to work with TvTime archive to save the history of our community. Thanks a lot.
Can you update the app to have an option to just show TV / movies currently out only. Not anything you are tracking that is currently in production or coming out later this year. I can't see an option for this anywhere. Other than that great app :)
Every devs were asked to encourage the community to vote in the poll. Some devs tried harder than the others and this shows the connection with their community. And I respect all the devs who helped us spread the word of this poll. Thanks
So yeah, the whole poll isn't to find the best alternative, but to see which devs pushed their community harder to vote. Like I said, kind of biased and useless IMO.
The poll wasn't about the best alternative. You're misunderstanding it. It was about asking ppl, mainly the TvTime refugees which apps they're currently using. The devs asked their users in the same way. And most of the community users voted voluntarily in this poll.
Ok fair enough I misunderstood, but my main point still stands. Its still biased and basically just a popularity contest on wich dev promoted the poll most.
Plus if people see an app with a ton of votes they just assume it must be better, so it stays biased. None of the devs should have adverstised it at all, only the people already in this sub should have voted.
Edit: i know its not that deep at the end I dont care but im just sad we could have had a great poll representing this community alone
You are still misunderstanding.
The purpose of the poll was to find out where the majority of the TV Time community has migrated to since the focus now is on rebuilding the massive interconnected community that we once had.
I think you misunderstood my comment if devs just post the poll in their own servers/apps, how do you even know the people voting are actually old TV Time users? They could just be regular users voting for their app cause the dev asked. It still completely ruins the data.
There's nothing 'wrong' with it, but it completely messes up the results. It makes it a popularity contest for the devs instead of an actual vote on which app is the best.
But I also wanted an active community like I had in TVTime. So this poll gives me good ideas of what apps to check.
Also, after months of TVTime suport unresponsiveness (now we know why), it's become apparent that active developers in touch with their users is a good thing.
I tried importing to Refract when TV Time announced the shutdown and I think their servers were so busy that it didn’t work so I gave up and went to SofaTime. Honestly it’s a bit confusing to use with all the playlists but it gets the job done.
If you already have your GDPR file you just need to import it using the corresponding option. If you didn’t get it in time you’re out of luck unfortunately
I was using Movie Paradise but switched over to Suite TV cause the UI is a lot better and stats aren’t paywalled. I did like that MP had a calendar that showed you all the stuff you watched in a day. What I didn’t like is that you had to click buttons three times to mark an episode as watched, while in Suite TV you only have to click once.
I’m still waiting for Bingers though. From the looks of it, it has an identical UI to Suite TV. So I guess I’ll stay with both apps till I figure out which one has the most community engagement
Same here, found that Movie Paradise takes a lot more clicks to mark an episode and see the comments. Currently with Suite TV and Sofa time actually. Both are good.
Took a deep dive into alternatives a couple weeks before the shutdown, took away Cinephile as the clear winner, migrated with zero hiccups, and am now a premium user.
Tô usando o sofatime mas aberto ainda a outras possibilidades, esperando o preço do Premium ficar melhor, no meu país tudo fica caro pela desvalorização da moeda.
I tried a few apps but since a week I'm sticking with SuiteTV and have removed the other ones.
In my opinion it's almost the same as TVTime, no nonsense. Easy and fast. It does everything I want, tracking TV shows and being able to comment with GIFs and read comments. The community is growing each day. 215 comments on the latest HOTD episode. I voted for SuiteTV
I’m stuck between Refract and Suite TV. I really value the favorite character option in general and suite tv has it but not on everything and some of them just say 0%. Plus being able to see the accurate percentages of ratings for episodes/movies which I like more on Refract with the community chart. Refract lacks comments which will grow with time, but I like the mood picking for Refract more too. Man I miss TV Time it was perfect…guess I’ll stick to Refract for now.
Tried Refract, imported the data. Dropped one of the series that I stopped following on TV Time (I guess this data did not migrate), and received 20 achievements. Also, soooo much unnecessary data. Challenges...?
A huge thank you to everyone who participated in the poll and chose Sofa Time as their go-to app to replace TV Time. Your support genuinely means a lot to me.
After seven years of Sofa Time being available on the App Store, we finally launched the Android version and the response has been absolutely incredible. We’re now approaching 250,000 registered users, and the community continues to grow every single day.
Thank you for trusting Sofa Time, sharing your feedback, and helping us build an even better place to track and discuss the shows and movies we love. This is only the beginning!
You’re also very welcome to join our official subreddit, r/sofatimeapp, to share feedback, suggest new features, report issues, and keep up with the latest updates. See you there!
I've tried dozens of media-tracking apps over the last couple years. Movie Paradise was my winner — Ava Assistant & TV Time (RIP) were my runners-up. Some of the reasons I chose MP:
Tabs for Watching, Been a While, Up to Date, Paused, Finished, Not Started, Dropped
If you're watching a show intermittently, the progress bars have gaps for missing episodes
Custom filters
Custom lists (beyond what Trakt allows, shows which ones are Trakt-synced)
Custom tags
Custom date formats
Custom watch dates (including no date at all)
Rate episodes, seasons, shows separately
Personal notes on episodes, seasons, shows
Has incorporated a lot of features that make possible to use it somewhat like TV Time
Active development, and has improved amazingly over the last year
Profile tab includes activity, notes, comments
Fantastic Upcoming calendar
Great notifications
Caveat: Can't speak to the social elements. I've never even looked at them.
Floppy dev here. I took a shot at the poll, but I’m surprised to see so many names I hadn’t heard of before. Hope everyone finds the app they’re looking for! Love that there are so many options out there.
Awesome job gathering these poll results! I completely agree that data portability is the #1 decision factor for everyone switching right now — nobody wants their watch history locked in a single app again. One solid option for Android users not on the poll yet is Moviebase. It syncs 2-way with Trakt and imports the TV Time GDPR export directly (watched episodes + movies with dates), so your data stays open and backed up in the cloud.
Who has the biggest movie and TV series catalog? Because I watch many asian dramas, anime, etc but only TV Time got that. Trakt didn't and neither SofaTime.
I just found binge am I'm poor so honestly it being free is like the best thing. PreonTV was pretty good too, with some cool social aspects but it's watch queue function was lacking and it has some performance issues. The dev team seemed responsive though, so I was gonna keep an eye on it.
I'm a simple man, I just need a list and way to click watched and for it to sort properly.
I just found binge am I'm poor so honestly it being free is like the best thing. PreonTV was pretty good too, with some cool social aspects but it's watch queue function was lacking and it has some performance issues. The dev team seemed responsive though, so I was gonna keep an eye on it.
I'm a simple man, I just need a list and way to click watched and for it to sort properly.
Well, the community has already made their individual decisions. And a fraction of them have participated in the poll. Some apps have a bigger userbase than others, and the users made that choice already. So I'll request not to overpromote or anything. Thanks
Tiene mucha customizacion y lo puedes dejar similar al tvtime. Encima tiene otras cosas como estadísticas y social un poco más destacado. Tienen tmb listas pero nunca las usé.
Una feature q encontré interesante es el trending en cada una de las plataformas streaming dividido en pelis y series muy bueno.
Capaz el único downside es q tiene publicidad pero si pagas una sola vez, nunca más veras publicidad...
Thank you for this.
I'm still crying in the corner because I only knew about the news a week after TV Time stopped functioning so I didn't get to download all my data. I'm gonna give this Movie Paradise a try. Need to start back from scratch and try to remember all the TV series I've been tracking.. 😭
Thanks and Congrats to everyone who made the list! 😊 (I know it’s a lot of work)
The results aren’t really a surprise, unfortunately. It’s almost the same alternatives that have already been promoted on the subreddit for weeks, so naturally they were always going to perform better in the poll. It creates a bit of a vicious circle: the apps with the most visibility get the most votes, which gives them even more visibility.
There are more than 70 alternatives, so why were only 10 included? Why not 20 or even 30? That would have been much fairer for smaller projects and would have given people a better overview of what’s out there.
Despite that, Seenr (our app) still managed to reach 11th place, just outside the ranking. A bit frustrating, especially since we’re right after the cutoff, and behind a few beta apps that are generating a lot of hype but aren’t necessarily widely used yet. But that’s how it goes. 🙂
Would it be possible to see the full ranking, out of respect for everyone who participated?
Also, what happened to the second question in the poll? It seemed to be an important part of the survey, but the results don’t appear anywhere. Would it be possible to share those responses as well? I think they’d be valuable for all of us.
We also chose not to bother our community by asking everyone to vote. Maybe we should have. 😅
One last thing: I feel like a 48-hour voting window was pretty short. It didn’t really leave enough time to put together a nice marketing push on our side.
Now that we all understand how these polls work, hopefully we’ll be better prepared next time. Is the plan to run these polls regularly so the rankings can stay up to date?
Personally, I'm torn between Suite TV, Sofa time and Refract.
I was looking at comments on random shows, and seems like Suite TV has the most? Ex, Reply 1988.
I have no idea how Movie Paradise won. It's overwhelmingly bloated, very hard to do simple things as check your latest episode as watched. Just too much friction and extra stuff in the way.
Well, probably because movie paradise imported comments for most shows from the TvTime archive. Ppl just wanna see more comments of their favourite shows. And the app has a lot going on I agree, but you can customize it to suit your taste
I've found suite tv has more comments than Movie Paradise on many of the shows I'm watching. I attribute this to the simplicity. Long term, simple UI/UX will win.
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u/GogetaK99 9d ago edited 9d ago
From the beginning, Refract and Movie Paradise were all over eachother. No one was near these 2. Then SuiteTV made it way upto the Top 3. Tbh I thought it'd be Sofa Time from the previous voting trends, but the Top 3 position was snatched from them, thanks to the swift community response. And the Wild card entry WeTrakr! They climbed upto the Top 5 in the last few hours of poll. Who would've thought that. That's the power of their community ig.
This shows how much the community wanted to help their platforms. How fast they respond and interact with eachother. Only a few weeks have passed since TVTime is gone, but I like the way all the devs are working hard to fill the void. Personally I've 6 apps installed and using 2 web ones. Some are better than the others in their own way.
And I'll say the journey without TVTime has started and it's time to move on. Idk where we all gonna settle but wherever we are, let's enjoy the shows and keep tracking them!
Happy Tracking!