I am an idiot.
Yesterday I wrote about my frustration that no Last.fm style service existed for TV and film. Last night I went home and found two such web apps in less than ten minutes. It turns out, I was Googling wrong.
There may actually be more than two out there, but it was Trakt and Simkl that caught be eye. Idiotic names aside, both appear to be healthy and robust options with exactly the functionality I was after. Simkl is clearly the baby of the two, with less interactivity with third party services and no current mobile applications on offer. Trakt, on the other hand, appears to have undertaken the Spotify model and launched with a robust API, resulting in adoption by dozens of third-party services. Only time will tell if they complete that model, eventually buying out the few they like and pulling the rug out from beneath the others...
Trakt also wins out in the aesthetics department, with a much more modern and refined style, layout and UI. Conversely, Simkl feels like a leftover remnant of the Web 2.0 era. Trakt does lose points for hiding some relatively key features behind a pay wall, such as in depth analytics and IFTTT integration, but all the features you absolutely need only cost your login credentials, so it isn't a major roadblock.
I conducted some (very) informal testing last night to see which I might prefer long term. Both were pretty easy to setup, search and navigate though though I found Trakt simpler to retroactively scrobble a show to (a pattern begins to emerge). Trakt's functionality enabling you to set when you watched a show, going back months, means that the hurdle of cinemas/analogue TV becomes fairly manageable. Simkl likely has these features hidden within its less intuitive UI, but I never found them.
Whilst watching a film in the evening, I tried to test out the mobile options. Simkl simply doesn't have any at the moment, which is a fairly major black mark. Trakt, as mentioned, has a huge variety but none are actually that great. Most of the Android apps only cater for TV, whereas I need a service that does film as well. The remaining options were a mixture of poor design, buggy features and bad reviews. Even when I did work out the best way to search their archives I found all but one (Cathode) failed to actually return the film I was watching, despite it being present in the Trakt database. Even then, once found, I couldn't retroactively scrobble the film, instead being forced to choose 'just watched' or 'currently watching'.
To be clear, this is definitely not Trakt's fault. It would be nice if they launched their own mobile app with a focus on their core features, such as scrobbling, but I can understand why they've gone this route. For me, it will mean I can use Cathode when I'm at a friend's house or the cinema to scrobble as I watch; if I forget, I can add it in later from the Trakt interface itself. That's a fair compromise and offers a level of flexibility I'm surprised isn't also behind the pay wall.
For now, then, Trakt has won my support. I signed up to both with test accounts to try them out and both get top marks for making it easy and fairly clear how to permanently delete those accounts. I've since signed up to Trakt 'properly' and back-filled my viewing habits for 2017 so far. You can follow along here, if you're at all interested.
It also turns out that my "New 52" challenge has already become more taxing than I had anticipated. Allowing myself a whole week should have removed any stress, but come Tuesday morning on week #2 and I was panicking. I didn't have any ideas and realised that I'm away at the weekend. I felt like I was running out of free time and it's amazing how that was sufficient to freeze out my rational mind entirely. The result was a rushed out, imperfect article on a non-existent issue. I felt a little stupid when I realised. I was tempted to remove the #2 from the title and stick it on this post instead, but I'm not going to. I'm going to leave that flag there as a reminder to chill out a bit more in the future. Hopefully it helps.
