How to get notified when a new episode of your show airs
23 Jun 2026
The worst way to find out a show you love is back: three months late, from a meme about the finale. Between staggered weekly releases, mid-season breaks and year-long gaps between seasons, knowing when something actually airs has become genuinely hard.
Here are the ways people try to solve it, and why most of them leak.
Relying on the streaming apps
Netflix, Disney+ and the rest all have “remind me” or notification features. Three problems. First, each service only tells you about its own shows, so you need every app’s notifications switched on. Second, their notifications mix reminders with marketing, so you learn to ignore them. Third, they are inconsistent: a returning season sometimes triggers a notification and sometimes just appears.
Following the show on social media
Works, occasionally, if the show’s account posts the date and the algorithm happens to show you. This is not a system; it is a lottery ticket.
Calendar subscriptions
Some websites publish TV calendars you can subscribe to. Reliable, but heavy: your calendar fills with entries for shows you follow, and you still have to notice the entry among your actual appointments.
A tracker with air-date notifications
This is the boring, correct answer. A tracking app already knows which shows you follow, and it gets air dates from a live TV database, so it can do the one thing you actually want: send a push notification on the day a new episode of one of your shows airs, regardless of which streaming service it lives on.
The thing to be picky about is notification discipline. Many apps use their notification channel for engagement: recommendations, social activity, “someone commented” nudges. Once that starts, you mute the app and the whole system fails.
OnNext takes the strict line: one notification, on the day an episode of a show you follow airs, and nothing else, ever. Follow your shows, and switch Episode alerts on in Settings. Everything about how it works is on the features page.
However you solve it, the test is simple: when your show comes back, do you find out from your phone that morning, or from the internet a month later?