Your Watch History as a City
Every tower block is a show; height is its episode count. Drag to orbit the skyline. Move the sliders — the city and the life-math rebuild instantly.
*Assuming 16 waking hours per day. The point of tracking apps is exactly this: your history is a real, quantifiable piece of your life.
Why Beloved Apps Shut Down
Free users, real server bills
Tracking apps store millions of rows per day and pay for metadata licensing (episode data often comes from licensed databases). Without strong subscription revenue, costs outpace income.
API dependency
Many trackers are built on third-party metadata APIs. When licensing terms or prices change upstream, the whole product's economics can flip overnight.
Acquisition then sunset
Apps get acquired for their audience or data, then "consolidated." The feature you loved rarely survives the migration roadmap.
The lesson
None of this is malice — it is economics. Your defense is portability: keeping an exportable copy of anything you would grieve losing.
The Data-Portability Playbook
Export before the lights go out
Shutdown notices usually give 30–90 days. Look for "Export data", "Download my data", or a GDPR/CCPA data request — in the EU, Article 20 of the GDPR gives you a legal right to receive your data "in a structured, commonly used and machine-readable format".
Prefer open formats
A CSV or JSON export survives forever; a proprietary backup file dies with the app. A good TV export has columns like show_title, tvdb_id, season, episode, watched_at. Stable IDs (TVDB/TMDB/IMDb) matter more than titles — titles are ambiguous, IDs are not.
Map IDs, then import
Successor apps (Trakt, Serializd, TV Show Favs and others) import by matching those IDs. A 95% automatic match with 5% manual cleanup is a normal, good outcome for a decade of history.
Keep a cold copy
Store the raw export in your own cloud drive or a git repo. Apps are interfaces; the file is the asset. Repeat yearly — treat it like backing up photos.
Worked example: a 412-show export as CSV is tiny — roughly 12,000 episode rows × ~80 bytes ≈ 1 MB. A decade of your media life fits in an email attachment. There is no technical reason ever to lose it; only a habit reason.