I Tried Binge, the Letterboxd Alternative That I Now Like More Than Letterboxd
The aptly named Binge is a new app for iPhone, iPad and Mac that has set its sights on Letterboxd. Like that popular movie-centric social media platform, Binge lets you track what you’ve watched and what you want to watch. But while Letterboxd sticks primarily to movies, Binge covers both movies and TV shows, and adds “fear warnings,” an innovative feature that Letterboxd can’t match (although in testing it, I got mixed results).
Keeping track of my viewing is something I really need help with, and even though I’ve had a Letterboxd account for a while, I don’t log into it and update my viewing history very often. Because it offers a single place to keep up with both movies and TV, I decided to try Binge and despite the above-mentioned issues with its exceptional functionality, I mostly liked what I found.
Use Binge to track both movies and TV shows
You don’t need to create an account to use Binge, but if you do, you can sync your activity in the app across multiple Apple devices. As for the interface, you have three tabs to view new and trending content:Discover, MoviesAnd Shows. The last tab is the Librarywhere your viewing is recorded.
Tracking is very simple: you can mark movies or TV shows as watched or that you would like to watch in the future; For shows, you can also save the number of episodes you’ve watched. All of this is then sifted through in a timeline on your Library page. (One non-Letterboxd feature I like is the option to choose a random selection from your to-watch list — a good bet for times when you just can’t decide what to watch.)
Binge offers a clean and simple layout.
Credit: Lifehacker
Overall, Binge is simpler than Letterboxd, which packs a lot of options (marking something as watched, rating it, adding it to lists, and sharing it with others) into the same pop-up window; Although this app offers more things to do, it also seems cluttered. Binge only provides the basics, which is a plus for a low-effort media tracker like me.
The same goes for the built-in search: it’s much more comprehensive on Letterboxd, where you can really drill down into search categories like genre, year released, and cast and crew members. Binge offers a simpler keyword search for matching titles or people associated with a title.
Still, Binge is impressive in terms of the amount of information it presents for each movie or TV show. In addition to cast and crew lists, you have trailers, web ratings, awards and nominations, information on which streaming app you need to watch something, and a parents’ guide that flags anything scary, violent, or adult in nature.
You get a lot of information about each title.
Credit: Lifehacker
The Library tab is well done, sorting everything in an easy-to-follow way, although you can create collections of movies and shows if you want to organize them more deliberately. I like the idea of Your next watch section, which recommends titles based on what you’ve already seen, and it gave me some interesting choices.
You can customize much of the interface in Binge, so if there are features you don’t really care about, like reviews of a movie or listing how many awards it’s won, you can turn them off with a single tap. It is also possible to tone down certain effects, such as parallax and shimmer, which are applied by default.
The jump scare tracker is a great idea, but it didn’t really work for me
I’m not really a fan of horror or violence – I really don’t like being scared or disgusted – which can make watching films difficult. Some of the most critically acclaimed and popular films include these elements, and so I want to watch them while fearing trauma.
What do you think of it so far?
Binge offers a solution to this problem in the form of jump scare warnings: many title pages offer a timeline of when the jumps are coming and details about what happens (so beware of spoilers). There’s a timer you can start when you start watching that will ostensibly send a fear alert to your phone as “live activity” before the scary scene happens. However, even though the timeline screen was simple enough, I couldn’t get live activity notifications to appear consistently: the app seemed to lose track of what it was tracking and when, and there was no way to manually adjust the elapsed time once you’d already started a movie or TV show. Still, the timeline of the jump scare itself is useful. The scares are categorized into minor and major, and if you don’t mind being warned about a plot point or two in advance, then they’re handy if you want to know when to cover your eyes.
A jump scare timeline.
Credit: Lifehacker
Unfortunately, jump scare graphics are not available for all films. While browsing, I discovered that films like The invisible man (2020) and Prometheus (2012) propose them, but they are missing on older rates such as The silence of the lambs (1991) and Single white woman (1992). I’m not sure where Binge gets its data from (maybe WhenJumpScare), but it’s not guaranteed for every movie.
The other drawback: jump scares are a paid extra in Binge. You’ll need to sign up for a monthly ($1.99), annual ($17.99), or lifetime ($49.99) plan to get them. Subscription also unlocks several other features, such as episode rating charts, the ability to set custom movie posters (also a paid feature on Letterboxd), and reminders for upcoming movies and shows.
The app also includes recommendations.
Credit: Lifehacker
The app also scores high for its data import and export tools. You can load existing information from your accounts across Trakt, Letterboxd, and iMDb and export everything you’ve logged into a JSON file for use elsewhere. You can also sync activity with Trakt, although this is another premium feature.
Binge is an interesting alternative to Letterboxd
Although die-hard movie fans will always prefer Letterboxd, especially for the built-in community and sharing features, Binge is a nice alternative for the rest of us. You can be up and running in just a few minutes, everything is neatly laid out and easy to scan, and there are plenty of cool touches sprinkled throughout. This could finally allow me to track my multimedia consumption more faithfully.
