Antonio Pinto, one of the original founders of TV Time, has launched Bingers, a new TV show and movie-tracking app designed to fill the gap left by TV Time's closure. The app is available now on iOS and Android, distributed through the App Store and Google Play. TechCrunch

TV Time was shut down by its owner, Whip Media, which decided to focus on AI efforts instead. At the time of its shutdown, TV Time had been installed more than 26.4 million times. The app's removal from app stores on July 15, 2026 followed weeks of user outcry; more than 28,000 users signed a Change.org petition asking Whip Media to save TV Time through crowdfunding or subscription support. Before the app was pulled, TV Time provided a GDPR-compliant export tool so users could download their data, and Bingers now offers a way to import from those archives.

Pinto, who started TV Time in 2011 under the original name TVShow Time as what he described as a "funny side project," announced Bingers' expected end-of-July 2026 launch on iOS and Android via his personal Instagram account in mid-July. TechCrunch had reported on July 13, 2026 that Pinto was building Bingers as a new home for fans of the shut-down app.

Bingers revives the social features that made TV Time a community hub for viewers. Users can create profiles, comment on shows and movies, add photos and GIFs to their comments, rate episodes, express opinions with emoji reactions, and vote on favorite characters. The social layer is central to the app's identity rather than an add-on.

On the architecture side, Bingers takes a notably lean approach. The app is designed to load users' libraries directly on their phones, offloading heavier processing tasks like the viewing calendar and watchlist to users' devices rather than the company's servers. This is a deliberate cost and scalability decision: by keeping compute on the client, Bingers minimizes server-side overhead. The app initially monetizes through direct user contributions to help cover server costs, a model that leans on community goodwill rather than advertising or subscription tiers.

The broader context here is a familiar one in consumer software. A beloved app accumulates millions of users over more than a decade, gets acquired, and is eventually shut down when the parent company pivots toward a different strategic priority. In this case, Whip Media's pivot to AI ended a product that had reached 26.4 million installs, and the founder is rebuilding from scratch without the original infrastructure or corporate backing.

What makes Bingers worth watching is the data-portability story as much as the feature set. TV Time's GDPR-compliant export tool, provided before the app's removal, gave users a lifeline for their viewing histories, episode ratings, and watchlists. Bingers' ability to import that data determines whether the new app can absorb a displaced community intact or whether users start fresh. For a social tracking app, the accumulated history of what you watched, when, and how you felt about it is the core asset. Lose that, and you lose the network effect.

The contribution-based monetization model is also a pragmatic bet on whether 26 million installs' worth of user loyalty translates into enough recurring support to keep servers running. It sidesteps the advertising dependency that often pushes consumer apps toward engagement-maximizing design choices, and it avoids a subscription paywall that would fragment the community at the moment of migration. Whether it scales beyond early adopters is an open question.

For the developer community, the architecture choice is the most technically interesting element. Pushing the viewing calendar and watchlist computation to client devices reduces the server footprint to whatever is needed for social features and data sync. That is a reasonable trade-off for a community-funded app with a lean team, though it does shift battery and performance costs onto the user's device and complicates cross-device consistency.

Bingers launches into a fragmented streaming landscape where viewers juggle multiple services, and a tracking app that aggregates viewing across providers fills a genuine organizational need. The question is whether a founder-led, community-funded app can sustain the social graph and data continuity that made TV Time sticky. Pinto built the original. He now has to rebuild the community around it.