What to Watch Tonight, Picked from Your Own Library

2 November 2026

Most "what should I watch" tools pick from a huge catalogue. They are good at telling you what is popular. They do not know that you are two episodes from the end of a show you love, or that a film has sat on your watchlist for a year.

Tonight, in OpenTV, only picks from your own library. It asks three short questions, then gives you three answers. Not a page of them. Three.

Tonight is part of OpenTV Plus.

Where to find it

Open the Shows tab. At the top of your Watch List there is a row called Tonight, with the line "Tell us how long you have". Tap it.

If you do not have Plus, the row opens the Plus screen instead. You can put it away with the ✕ on the right, and it stays gone.

The three questions

The screen opens with every question set to "doesn't matter", so there are already three picks on screen before you touch anything. Change a question and the picks change with it.

HOW LONG DO YOU HAVE?

• Under 30 min
• 30–60 min
• 1–2 hours
• Doesn't matter

WHAT DO YOU WANT?

• Carry on with something
• Start something new
• A film
• You choose

MOOD

• Light
• Funny
• Dark
• Exciting
• Anything

Time rules things out, mood moves them up

The two kinds of question do different jobs, and it helps to know which is which.

Time is a hard limit. If you say you have under 30 minutes, a two-hour film is not offered at all. It would not be a worse answer. It would be a wrong one.

Mood is a preference. A personal library is small, so if mood filtered things out, you would often get nothing. Instead, things that match your mood move up the list, and the rest stay in reach.

If a title has no known running time, Tonight only offers it when being wrong does not cost much. It will not suggest it when you said you have half an hour.

What the picks say

Each pick carries a small label that tells you why it is there:

• CARRY ON for a show you are partway through
• FINISH IT for a show you are close to finishing, with how many episodes are left
• START IT for a show you have not started yet
• FROM YOUR WATCHLIST for a film you saved for later

Being a couple of episodes from the end of something is the most satisfying thing to be offered, so those rank high.

The three picks are three different choices. You get one pick per show, so a library that is midway through one long series does not get that series' next three episodes. That would just be your Watch Next list again.

If only two things fit, you get two. Tonight does not pad the list with something silly to reach three.

If nothing fits at all, it says so: "Nothing in your library fits that. Try a longer evening, or let us choose."

Catch up before it returns

Below the picks there is a second section, Catch up before it returns.

It looks at shows you are behind on that have a new season coming, and turns the gap into a weekly pace. It says how many episodes behind you are, how many to watch a week, and how many days early that gets you there.

A few things about how it counts:

• The pace is always rounded up. A plan that needs 1.4 episodes a week becomes two a week, so any slack shows up as finishing early, not as a missed premiere.
• It sorts by how hard the catch-up is, not by which premiere is soonest. A season starting in three days with one episode to go is calm. One starting in six weeks with forty to go is not.
• When the gap is too big for the time left, it says so plainly: "that is more than a plan can honestly promise."

What it knows, and where that stays

Tonight works from what is already on your phone: what you have watched, how far you are in each show, what is on your watchlist, and running times. The picks are worked out on the phone. Nothing about your evening is sent anywhere.

That also means it gets better the more of your history OpenTV has. If you are coming from another app, bring your history first. See how to get your TV Time history back, or how to move from Trakt, Letterboxd, Simkl or IMDb.

When it helps most

• A weeknight with forty minutes before bed
• A long show you keep meaning to finish
• A watchlist full of films you saved and forgot
• A new season arriving and you are not sure you can make it

It will not tell you what is trending. It tells you what, out of the things you already chose, fits the time you have.

Get OpenTV

OpenTV is free on the App Store for iPhone and iPad and on Google Play for Android. Tracking, importing and your history are free. Tonight comes with OpenTV Plus.