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← All postsWhy TMDB says your Apple TV+ show airs a day early<br>Silo's next episode was listed as airing Thursday. Apple, and every press outlet covering it, said Friday. Neither was a mistake — and the reason turns out to be a documented data convention that quietly affects a large slice of TV apps.<br>13 August 2026 · 4 min read · WatchNext<br>A user reported that WatchNext was showing the wrong air date for Silo. Their favourites card said the next episode aired today. Google said tomorrow. One of us was wrong, and the obvious assumption was that it was us.<br>It was — but not for the reason we first thought, and the underlying cause is worth writing down, because it affects any app built on the same data.<br>First, a genuine bug of our own<br>The initial report was that the same episode showed different countdowns in different places in our app: a show card said “airs tomorrow” while the notification for the same episode said “airs today”.<br>That one was ours. Two different pieces of code were deciding what “today” meant in two different ways. One compared calendar days entirely within the show's own country's timezone. The other took the show's end-of-day cutoff, converted that instant into the viewer's local timezone, and compared calendar days there.<br>Those two approaches agree only when the show's timezone and the viewer's are close together. For a US show viewed from Germany — a nine-hour gap — they routinely land on different calendar days, shifting the whole today/tomorrow boundary depending on what time of day you happened to look. We fixed it by making both read from one shared function that only ever counts days in a single timezone.<br>And the two displays then agreed with each other perfectly. They were also both still wrong.<br>The part that wasn't our code<br>With the app now internally consistent, Silo still said “airs today” for an episode that Apple, and everyone reporting on it, placed the following day. So we went and checked the source data against published release dates, rather than trusting either one.<br>Like a great many TV apps, WatchNext gets show data from TMDB, the community-maintained movie and TV database. Here is what its air_date field said for two consecutive Silo episodes, next to the dates in press coverage:<br>EpisodeTMDBActually releasedS3E6 “The Drive”Thu 6 AugFri 7 AugS3E7 “Radio”Thu 13 AugFri 14 Aug<br>Both exactly one day early. Both a Thursday where the real release was a Friday — matching Silo's actual weekly Friday schedule. Two consecutive episodes ruled out a one-off typo in the database.<br>Why the date is “wrong” on purpose<br>It isn't a typo, and it isn't vandalism. TMDB's documented convention is that air_date records the earliest calendar day an episode becomes available in its country of origin — not the date the platform advertises.<br>For a traditional broadcaster those are the same day. For a global streaming service they are not. Per TMDB's own contributor discussion of this exact issue, Apple TV+ and Amazon Prime Video release episodes worldwide at a single instant rather than at local midnight in each country. That instant falls on the previous evening in the United States. So for a show whose origin country is the US, the earliest US calendar day it exists on is the day before the advertised release — and that's the date TMDB records, exactly as its policy says it should.<br>Worth being precise here: we verified the one-day gap ourselves, directly, against two episodes and published sources. The explanation for why comes from TMDB's contributors, and press reports of Apple's exact release hour are inconsistent with each other. The pattern is solid; treat the precise mechanism as well-supported rather than something we measured ourselves.<br>A control case, because one pattern isn't a rule<br>The obvious risk at this point is over-correcting — deciding “TMDB is a day early” and shifting everything, which would break every show that was already right.<br>So we checked a show releasing the same week on a different service: Stuart Fails to Save the Universe, on HBO Max. TMDB said 13 August. Press coverage said 13 August. No gap at all.<br>That's the important result. The discrepancy isn't general to TMDB, or to streaming, or to US shows. It tracks specifically with services that release globally at one instant. So the correction has to be scoped to those services, and every other show left alone.<br>What we actually did<br>WatchNext now treats a show's...