Binge Calculator Lets You Plan For All The TV

There's a new sort of calculator available for binge watching TV, created by developer Brian Yung. The calculator is called "Can I Binge?" and it's effectively a simple website. At said website, you can select a TV show, select a length of time, and hit the question mark.

With "Can I Binge?", Yung created a planner for the modern age. This tool "helps you figure out how long it'll take to binge a TV show." That's it. The website was "Built in quarantine by a designer who's trying to keep himself busy or else he's going to start talking to his furniture."

The tool asks which TV show you'd like to binge, including the vast majority of TV shows in the universe today. If you find a TV show that is not available on this website, we'd like to know about it. It has The Weird Al Show, it should have pretty much everything else.

Once a TV show is selected, the user decides a length of time. It starts with 1 week, and includes multiples of days, weeks, months, and years. Once the show and the amount of time are entered in the equation, the tool suggests yes or no, followed by "if you watch about X episodes per day."

If you enter "1 day", you'll generally get the answer "no" followed by "you'd need to watch non-stop for at least X days." This should allow you to see the general length of the entire show in days.

The data used in the website tool comes from The Movie Database (TMDb). This is different from IMDB, which is largely about the actors and creators of each piece of media. At TMBb (for movies), a user can see the length of each episode of a TV show and the number of episodes that appear in said show. With this information, Yung had everything he needed to create the binge calculator tool.

The "Can I Binge?" tool is up for a Webby Award here in 2021, too. It's up for "Weird" and up for "Personal Blog/Website."