Popular TV-tracking app TV Time is shutting down as company focuses on AI
Quick Answer
TV Time, a widely used TV tracking app, will cease operations on July 15 as Whip Media shifts its focus to enterprise AI solutions.
Quick Take
This decision impacts its user base, who will lose access to the app's features and services.
Key Points
- TV Time will shut down on July 15, 2023.
- Whip Media is pivoting towards enterprise AI products.
- Users will lose access to TV tracking features.
- The decision reflects a broader trend in tech towards AI.
- Whip Media's focus shift may impact its market positioning.
📖 Reader Mode
~3 min readTV Time, a popular app for tracking the shows you’re watching and engaging in community discussions, is shutting down. The company announced via in-app messages that TV Time’s app will be discontinued, no longer offering service after July 15, 2026.
The company blamed the expense of running the platform as a reason behind the decision, but a shift to a more AI-focused business seems to be the real culprit.
“While we loved supporting TV Time, it was no longer sustainable to continue operating the service as a free app, and there was not enough demand for a paid app,” the message read. “To everyone who tracked, discovered, and shared their love of TV and movies with us, thank you. Your passion and enthusiasm made TV Time more than an app. You made it a community.”
TV Time’s shutdown marks the end of one of the larger TV fan communities online, and underscores how the growth of the AI industry is shifting companies’ priorities. As businesses race to build AI products, consumer apps are sometimes shuttered, even if they have active user bases. Another example of this trend is read-it-later app Pocket, which still had loyal users but closed down as its owner Mozilla prioritized building out Firefox and AI-powered browsing experiences.
Owned by Whip Media, TV Time’s app has north of 26.4 million lifetime installs, per data from app intelligence provider Appfigures, and saw nearly 29,000 new downloads over the past 30 days. (Whip Media itself often referred to TV Time’s more than 25 million users in marketing materials.) Under Whip Media, TV Time’s data helped power a business intelligence ecosystem for the media industry. That meant the app alone didn’t have to be profitable as a consumer product, because the data it generated was the real value.
Things have changed at the company in more recent months. Whip Media was acquired by direct lender Blue Torch Capital in early 2025, which envisioned more of an AI-focused future for the company.
Under its new ownership, Whip Media pivoted from providing the sentiment analysis, ratings predictions, content optimization, and other data that could be informed by TV Time, to instead focus on more potentially profitable paths. This now includes its AI-powered automation and workflow management tool, Helix, which is used to enhance streaming analytics and supply chain orchestration.
What’s not clear is why the company wouldn’t sell the still-popular app instead of discontinuing it. Possibly, it may not have wanted to help another company generate the kind of data that could make it a more formidable competitor in the media and entertainment space. The app also showed a slowdown in download growth in the first half of this year, Appfigures’ data indicated.
Whip Media notes that the data collected via TV Time will not be used as part of any commercial service after TV Time ends, and everyone’s personal data will be deleted.
The company says the app will be removed from the app stores on July 15, but before then, users can request a download of their data through a GDPR-compliant export tool.
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Sarah has worked as a reporter for TechCrunch since August 2011. She joined the company after having previously spent over three years at ReadWriteWeb. Prior to her work as a reporter, Sarah worked in I.T. across a number of industries, including banking, retail and software.
You can contact or verify outreach from Sarah by emailing sarahp@techcrunch.com or via encrypted message at sarahperez.01 on Signal.
— Originally published at techcrunch.com
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