Introducing the new TV Club
By: David Attias
Tags: TV Shows, TV Series, Subscription, iOS App Development, Recommendation System

More than 1 and a half year ago, I wrote a blog post detailing the reason why I decided to stop improving TV Show Tracker 3 in order to focus on making a brand new TV Show Tracker from scratch. In a nutshell, the maintenance cost was too high and adding new features was nearly impossible as the code base was too old (a big chunk was written for iOS 3 nearly 10 years ago).

TV Show Tracker — now called TV Club (more on the naming later)—is now available on the App Store. This is a modern app (design and code-wise) ready to full-fill my promises of a better TV Show Tracker for the future.

As an independent single-person app development studio, developing a full-featured app can take a lot of time. In order to release the app as soon as possible, I decided to release the 4.0 with the same feature-set as TV Show Tracker 3 in addition to 1 single new feature: Club.

Club, a new peer-to-peer recommendations service

As you probably guessed, this feature plays an important role in this release, it even sneaked into the app name. I resisted to social features for a long time as I believed the “friends” feature you see in every apps were built out of real user need. The idea with Club is to provide people with much better recommandations than what Machine-Learning based algorithms are serving them on Netflix, Prime Video or Hulu.

How can we improve recommendations? By empowering TV Club’s 100,000 users community with a simple tool which allows powerful peer-to-peer recommandations. When a user asks for a recommandation, the app finds another user with same TV interest in order to ask for him a new show to watch. Optionally, the user can also guide the person who’s asked to recommend by giving a “hint show”, this will allow the requested user to provide a more accurate recommendation according to the requester’s mood.

I hope this will provide you with great new show ideas, please let me know as soon as you tested!

What about the next great features ?

Leveraging this flexible and clean code-base, I will be able to implement at fast pace the following developments which I have identified so far:

watchOS app

full featured iPad OS app

macOS client

tvOS client

Siri integration

The watch app, which is one of the driver behind the rewrote of TV Show Tracker didn’t make it on 4.0 in order to release ASAP but it will probably make it on 4.1 or 4.2 at the latest in the coming weeks.

The idea behind these developments is always to simplify the user experience by expending the way users can track their favorite TV Shows wether they are on iPhone, iPad or Apple TV. I truly believe in the mantra “less is more” and this is why I didn’t clutter the user interface throughout the years and this is what most loyal users loved about TV Show Tracker for years now.

Implementing all these features along maintenance and improvements to follow the continuous evolutions of the Apple OSes requires continuous work and it leads me to detail the reasoning behind the new business model of TV Club.

Why is it subscription-based now?

One-shot 1$ purchase is not a viable option for a software requiring continuous development over years. That was the naive business model which appeared with the App Store the first few years but has mostly disappeared since then.

Good software that you use daily for 5 years is definitely worth at least 20$ but I understand that it seems really hard to pay 20$ for an app when most of the app you use daily are free (such as Facebook, Gmail, Twitter, Apple Podcasts, WhatsApp or Instagram). Most of these apps have an Ads-only business model that works because they have 100s of million of users and/or funding that allows them to be in loss until they have enough users.

This is why subscription have become a viable business model for small developers. It allows people to pay-as-you-go software for a small amount of money and stop paying when you stop using it.

2$ for a year-long use of an app is definitely a good deal when you compare it to the amount you typicaly spend (~5$) for a 20 minute coffee experience. I believe that you get much more value for the money from TV Club.

What about people who already bought Premium (1$ upgrade) on TV Show Tracker ? Wether they upgraded 2 weeks or 5 years ago, they will benefit from 1-year free trial instead of the regular 1 month free trial. I understand that some people could say that it’s not what they paid for but I couldn’t make different cases and allow some people to keep the previous version and some people upgrade, it’s not possible on the App Store. Then, I decided to offer them 1 year of Gold to try it and continue the subscription if they enjoyed and believe it’s worth the price. At the end of the 1-year free trial, if you’re not convinced that it’s worth paying $1.99 for another year, just send an email to the support (link in the app) and I’ll extend your trial by another 6 month for free.

Looking forward to keep TV Club as the best and most simple app to track TV shows

I didn’t expected TV Show Tracker to last for 10 years on people’s home screens. I keep getting emails of happy users who checked the app daily for the past 5 years and it’s really what keeps me working hard on it.

To be honest, I wasn’t sure I would be able to complete the rewrite of TV Show Tracker when I wrote the initial blog post. As always in software development, I underestimated the work load and I’m not sure I would have committed to it if I knew it would take 1 year and a half to make it happen.

And last but not least, I would like to thank my wife Stéphanie and our three kids Gabin, Ethan and Samuel for supporting me instead of blaming me for working these long hours on night, weekends and holidays. I can really say that it wouldn’t have been possible without them.

If you enjoy the new version or just want to share feedback, please don’t hesitate to send me an email at support@tvclub.app or a tweet to @tvclubapp.