TV Time shut down — what to do now (and how to never lose your watchlist again)
By Taha Bilal Özbey · Published July 21, 2026
On 15 July 2026, TV Time — one of the world's most popular episode trackers — shut down for good. The apps stopped working, the website went dark and, most painfully, the data export portal went offline with everything else. Millions of people lost years of carefully logged watch history overnight.
This guide answers three questions: what exactly happened, what can (and cannot) be recovered, and the fastest way to rebuild a working watchlist — this time in a way no shutdown can take away from you.
What exactly happened?
The window between the shutdown announcement and the servers going dark was short, and so was the window to download your data. When the service was switched off, the export portal disappeared with it. There is no official archive, no grace period, and no address you can write to for your data after the fact.
Can your watch history be recovered?
The honest answer: no. No third-party site can pull your history out of a service whose servers are gone — if a page still says “upload your TV Time ZIP” as if the portal were alive, that promise is outdated. The realistic options are two: restore from an export file you saved yourself, or rebuild from memory.
Rebuilding your list in practice
- Start with what's airing now. Open a weekly schedule, walk through the current season and follow everything you were watching — for most people that covers 80% of the list in a few minutes.
- Go through your streaming profiles. Netflix, Prime Video and the others keep their own “continue watching” and history lists — use them as a memory aid for older shows.
- If you have any export file — from TV Time or another tracker — import it instead of retyping. MovieSchedule reads ZIP and CSV exports in your browser and shows a preview before anything is saved.
- Don't chase completeness. A tracker's real job is what you watch next; old history is a nice bonus, but the calendar ahead of you matters more.
How to make sure this never happens again
The real lesson of the shutdown isn't “pick a better app”. It's “never keep the only copy of your list inside someone else's product”. Before you settle on any tracking service, check four things:
- Free export, any time — JSON or CSV, with no support ticket and no paywall in front of it.
- Universal IDs in the export — AniList, TMDB or TVDB numbers, so another service can actually match your titles.
- A calendar (iCal) subscription — your upcoming episodes flow into Google or Apple Calendar, which nobody can shut down.
- No follow limits on the free tier — a cap on follows is how a list becomes a hostage.
MovieSchedule was built around exactly these rules: following is unlimited and free, the iCal feed is free, and your list can be exported at any moment with universal IDs. If we ever disappoint you, leaving takes one click — and that promise is the whole point.