How to read your TV Time GDPR export (and what to do with it now)

When TV Time shut down on July 15, 2026, the app disappeared — but if you requested your data export before the end, you're holding a zip file that contains your entire TV life: every episode you checked off, every rating, every rewatch. Here's how to make sense of it.

What's inside the zip

Depending on when you requested it, your export uses one of two layouts. Older exports have a flat structure with files like tracking-prod-records.csv or tracking-prod-records-v2.csv. Newer exports are split into folders by data category. Either way, the files that matter are plain CSV — you can open them in any spreadsheet app.

The important ones:

• Tracking records — one row per watched episode, with a series ID, season and episode numbers, and the timestamp you marked it watched. If you watched an episode more than once, it appears more than once. This is your history.
• Ratings — your episode, season, and show ratings on a 10-point scale.
• Watchlist — shows you saved for later but never started.

You'll also find movie rows mixed in if you used TV Time's movie tracking. And one thing you won't find: your comments and reactions. TV Time's community layer had no export path — it died with the app.

Reading the tracking CSV

Series are identified by TVDB IDs (TV Time was built on TheTVDB catalog), not by name alone. Episodes reference a series ID plus season and episode numbers, and timestamps are in YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS format. That means the file is machine-readable and precise — any tracker worth switching to can rebuild your full history from it, rewatches included.

What to do with it now

First: keep the zip safe. It's the only copy of your watch history that exists anywhere. Back it up like you would photos.

Second: don't retype your history by hand into whatever app you land on. Your export contains everything needed for an automatic import — series IDs, episode numbers, timestamps, ratings.

We're building Seriesly TV — a free, TV-only tracker with a full TV Time importer: episodes, rewatch cycles, and ratings, all preserved with original watch dates. Park your zip in the vault and it'll be imported automatically the day your account opens, or join the waitlistand import it yourself later. Free, forever — data portability shouldn't cost anything.

Didn't export in time?

If you never requested your GDPR export, it's unfortunately too late — the servers are gone. If you emailed TV Time's data protection contact before shutdown and are still waiting, watch your inbox; some requests were fulfilled after the app went dark. And if you tracked on Trakt or Simkl in parallel, both offer exports we can import too.