Forget Letterboxd and JustWatch – this rival app has one killer feature that I now can’t live without

We're all struggling under the weight of having too much to watch, aren't we?

Multiple streaming services are releasing movies and TV shows at a rate that makes it impossible to keep up with even the small portion of the content that is actually worth watching.

Perhaps it's because I'm now in my 40s, but I'm finding it even harder to keep up these days. I've lost track of the number of TV shows that everyone is talking about that I either never got around to watching or started but never finished.

In the old days, I kept lists. Oh, the lists! Lists in notebooks, lists on my phone, lists in Excel spreadsheets.

For the last few years, though, I've been using JustWatch, which is a very good place to list the movies and TV shows you want to watch and then tick them off when you've finally found time.

Several of my colleagues are very keen on Letterboxd, too, which seems to do a similar thing but is more socially motivated, from what I understand. As a grumpy old millennial, this social aspect does not appeal to me.

But while JustWatch has served me fairly well, I'm not terribly good at ticking things off once I've watched them.

That's not such a big deal with movies (I've not quite hit the age where I forget entire films that I've seen), but I'm afraid I have started lots of TV shows, been distracted by something else, and then forgotten to ever go back to them.

But I have found a solution, and that solution is Trakt.

The return of scrobbling

At its core, Trakt really appears to be attempting to do the same sort of stuff that Letterboxd and JustWatch do – create lists of stuff you want to watch, tick things off once you've seen them, and post about it in the service if that's your sort of thing.

But Trakt has one killer feature up its sleeve that I've not seen in any similar app: scrobbling.

I bet you've not heard the word 'scrobbling' for a while, have you? Once the way music addicts tracked everything they listened to across all platforms and services via Last.fm (remember that?), scrobbling is a word that has drifted out of the lexicon, presumably because most people now stick to just one music streaming service, which itself has a recommendation engine that renders Last.fm redundant.

But Trakt has brought scrobbling to movies and TV shows, and I'm all for it.

Within the Trakt app, you can link all (well, most) of the streaming services to which you subscribe. It will then keep an eye on your accounts on those services and scrobble anything that you watch.

This ensures that the content Trakt recommends to you is up to date and based on things you really have recently watched, rather than skewed towards the few things you remembered to manually tick off your list.

There's also a dedicated Recently Watched rail towards the bottom of the Trakt app that shows the most recently scrobbled content that you've watched. Looking for a show you started a while ago and then forgot about? Tapping 'View All' will show your entire viewing history across all of your services.

In the few weeks I've been using Trakt, I've been reminded about and subsequently finished Reservation Dogs, American Primeval and 1923. That's a lot of good TV that would otherwise probably still be sitting in my forgotten TV pile.

Trakt's automatic tracking isn't perfect – I've had the odd missed stream and it doesn't support local services such as BBC iPlayer or Channel 4 – but the feature is still in beta, so I can live with that.

It's also very much worth noting that the feature is part of Trakt's VIP service, which costs £5.99 per month.

For less forgetful people, that will probably seem like an unnecessary expense, but it feels worth it to me... at least until a rival starts offering the same thing for free.

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