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How to Rate TV Episodes and Films with Half Stars

Five stars is a small scale. A good episode and a great one often end up with the same four, and the difference you felt is lost.

OpenTV keeps the five stars TV Time used, and adds half steps. You can rate every episode and every film, and the rating is free.

Here is how it works.

Rating an episode

Open any episode. On its page there is a heading: RATE THIS EPISODE.

Below it are five stars, each with its own word under it, the same ones TV Time had:

  1. BAD
  2. OK
  3. GOOD
  4. SUPER
  5. WOW

Tap a star and the episode gets that many whole stars. That is all most people ever need, and it works exactly as before.

Half stars: slide, do not aim

Nobody wants to aim a finger at half a star on a phone screen. So OpenTV does not ask you to.

Put your finger on the stars and slide across them. The rating moves in half steps as you go, with a small tick of vibration at each one, and the number shows next to the heading while you slide: 3.5, then 4, then 4.5. Lift your finger when it is right.

Under the stars there is a reminder of this: "Slide across the stars for half stars".

A tap is still a whole star. A slide gives halves. You never get a half star by accident.

Changing or removing a rating

Tap a different star, or slide again, to change it.

Tap the same star again to take the rating back. The episode goes back to having no rating at all, which is not the same as a zero. A rating you removed does not drag your averages down.

Rating a film

Films work the same way. Open a film and look for RATE THIS MOVIE. Tap for whole stars, slide for halves.

There is one rule for films: you rate something you have watched. If you try to vote on a film that is not marked watched yet, OpenTV asks "Watched this movie?" and offers to mark it.

How you felt, too

Right under the stars is a second question, HOW DID YOU FEEL?, with twelve feelings to pick from, such as Shocked, Touched, Amused and Tense. You can pick more than one, or none.

Stars say how good it was. Feelings say what it did to you. They are separate on purpose, and you can use either without the other.

Your best and worst episodes of a show

Once you have rated a few episodes of a show, open the show's page and find the Ratings row: "Your best and worst, and every episode".

It opens a page with two tabs.

Overview shows the high and low points of your own ratings:

Episodes shows every episode you rated, season by season, as a grid you can read at a glance. It is a quick way to see where a long show peaked for you, and where it lost you.

If every episode you rated got the same score, it says so, rather than inventing a low point.

You can share your ratings as a picture from the same page.

Your ratings in the rest of the app

Ratings are not just stored. They are used:

The community's numbers, if you want them

Joining the community is optional. If you join, you also see how everyone else rated an episode: the average sits under RATE THIS EPISODE, and each star gets a percentage under its word. The Ratings page also shows the community's highest and lowest rated episodes next to yours.

If you never join, your ratings stay on your phone and you see only your own.

Ratings you bring with you

OpenTV stores ratings out of ten behind the scenes and shows them as five stars with halves. That matters when you import.

See how to get your TV Time history back or how to move from Trakt, Letterboxd, Simkl or IMDb.

Is it free?

Yes. Rating episodes and films, half stars, feelings and the Ratings page are all free, with no ads and no account.

Get OpenTV

OpenTV is free on the App Store for iPhone and iPad and on Google Play for Android. Open the last episode you watched and give it the half star it deserves.

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