Editors' Note, May 29, 2014:This post has been updated for clarity.
Which one is more of a time commitment: "Breaking Bad" or "The Walking Dead"? "The Wire" or "The Sopranos"? "Game of Thrones" or "Downton Abbey"?
If you wonder how much of your life you'll devote to your next binge-watching endeavor, then head to Tiii.me and perform this three-step process:
1. Enter the name of a show.
2. Choose the number seasons for which you'd like to calculate a total runtime.
3. Hit the arrow button to see the total days, hours, and minutes required of you.
You can enter multiple shows to receive a combined total, should you be planning on spending the majority of your summer in front of the tube (or flat-screen, or laptop, or tablet, as it were). Be careful to remove your previous search query (by mousing over a show's box shot at the bottom of the page and clicking the X) before starting a new search, if you are attempting to compare the effort required to binge watch one show with that of another. By default, Tiii.me calculates a cumulative total when you search for additional shows.
The site performs a basic equation: (# of seasons) x (# of episodes per season) x (runtime of an episode) = total time
The runtime of an episode seems to get rounded up to the next half hour if you search for all of the seasons of a show. The average "Breaking Bad" episode, for example, is 47 minutes long, but the total it returns for the the full 62 episodes over the show's five seasons is 2 days, 14 hours -- or 62 hours. In contrast, choose one season of the show and it returns a total time of 12 hours 24 minutes, which is a more exact total. (Though for the final 16-episode final season, I counted up the runtime of each episode and calculated a total runtime of 12 hours 41 minutes. Perhaps Tiii.me stops counting when the credits roll, or perhaps it uses a simplified formula for calculating the average runtime of a show over the course of a season.)
Lastly, a colleague of mine reports that the site acted buggy on both Chrome and Firefox, not clearing previous searches even though he had removed past shows by clicking the X to delete the box shots at the bottom of the page. Tiii.me worked without issue for me on both browsers on my MacBook Pro, but if you experience similar behavior, we suggest you clear your browser cache and refresh the site.
Via MakeUseOf.