Trakt helps you keep track of your streaming shows

With so much to watch across so many streaming services, it’s entirely too easy to lose track of everything.

That’s where an app called Trakt comes in. Trakt can tell you where to watch pretty much any streaming show or movie, but it can also remember how much of a series you’ve watched and keep you in the loop on new episodes.

While Trakt has been around since 2010, it recently added a way to automatically track what you’re watching across a half-dozen major streaming services. It’s a key differentiator from other streaming guide apps, such as Reelgood and JustWatch, whose show-tracking features require you to manage your watch history manually. The feature is part of Trakt’s VIP subscription, which costs $6 per month or $60 per year.

I received a temporary VIP membership to try out the automatic tracking, and while there’s bunch more I’d like to see from Trakt before paying that toll myself, it’s a promising glimpse at how streaming guides ought to work.

How Trakt tracks your shows

If you do have a VIP membership, you can set up automatic tracking through Trakt’s mobile apps for iOS or Android. There you’ll find a “Streaming Scrobbler” menu for logging into each of your streaming services.

Trakt currently supports automatic tracking for Netflix, Hulu, Disney+, Max, Amazon Prime, and Apple TV+, with more to come in the future. After logging in, you can select which user profiles to sync, and the app will start pulling recently watched items into its “Up Next” menu. The result is a unified list of everything you’re in the process of watching.

If you select something to watch through Trakt, it’ll load that content in the appropriate streaming app, and anything new you watch will automatically sync back to Trakt’s Up Next menu. Trakt also offers an Apple TV app, which you can use to play videos on your television; an app for Android TV/Google TV devices is in the works.

Trakt under the hood

To monitor what you’re watching, Trakt relies on a third-party service called Younify, which I wrote about a couple of years ago. Younify is from the same company that makes PlayOn, a DVR for streaming services, and it uses the same underlying technology to scrape your viewing history from streaming platforms.

In essence, Younify has figured out the folder structure that streaming services use to organize content. That allows it to see, for instance, which shows are inside the “Continue Watching” section in apps like Hulu and Netflix.

Younify already offers its own app for iOS and Android, but it’s bare-bones. You can’t use the app to add shows to your watchlist or remove items from your watch history, and it provides no information about a show’s critical consensus or unreleased episodes.

Instead of building out those features on its own, Younify is now partnering with apps like Trakt, which pay for Younify’s data on a per-user basis. In addition to Trakt, Younify also works with Queue and CineSearch, which have their own streaming recommendation services.

Of these, I find Trakt most compelling, because it’s focused as much on keeping up with current shows as discovering new ones. Beyond just showing what you’ve watched lately, it also includes a schedule of upcoming episodes, which is helpful for plotting out the weekly drip of shows like Severance.

Trakt has room for improvement

Jared Newman / Foundry

As I mentioned earlier, Trakt has been around for about 15 years, and co-founder Justin Nemeth says it has roughly 811,000 monthly active users. There’s clearly a dedicated audience for obsessive show tracking, even if it’s not happening automatically.

But for a newcomer like me, Trakt’s many bells and whistles can be overwhelming. Basic actions like adding a show to your watchlist require multiple menu layers to navigate, and its many menu icons—which include things like reviews, private notes, and content collections—can be tough to decipher. Trakt’s Apple TV app is much easier to use, with stripped-down menu options and clearer button labels, but that just makes me yearn for a simpler version of the service on mobile devices and web browsers.

Jared Newman / Foundry

Trakt is also still working on bringing in more data from Younify, such as items you’ve added to Netflix’s own watchlist. Support for more streaming services is coming as well, including Peacock and Paramount+, as Younify makes that data available to app developers.

Beyond that, Trakt is missing a golden opportunity to help people figure out which streaming services to cancel. While the app offers “month in review” and “year in review” features, they don’t tell you how much time you’ve spent watching individual streaming services. That information alone—and maybe some convenient cancellation links—might justify the cost of a VIP subscription if it helped save money elsewhere.

Why Trakt matters

Most streaming devices already have their own ways of tracking what you’re watching. You’ll now find “Continue Watching” rows on Roku, Fire TV, Google TV, and Apple TV, and all of them are capable of looking across different streaming services.

But as I wrote back when Younify first launched, those features have blind spots. Apple TV and Fire TV don’t track your watch history from Netflix. Google TV doesn’t track Paramount+. Roku’s “Continue Watching” menu is tucked so far out of sight you might not realize it exists. And with the exception of Apple, none have the ability to mark individual episodes as watched or unwatched, so things can easily get out of whack.

Trakt is a more complete service, and it’s not tied to any specific streaming platform. If you have an Apple TV box in one room and a Roku in another, Trakt will monitor your streaming progress all the same. And unlike major streaming platforms, it has no sponsored content larding up its menus, and no vested interest in pushing you toward any particular service. It’s the kind of service that’s sorely needed now, even if it isn’t perfect.

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