Terrarium TV

» see terrariumtv.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Terrarium TV was an Android app that did one thing. You searched for a film or an episode, it went and found links to it on file hosts, and it played them. The site's first posts are dated 24 April 2016 against version 1.1.1, requiring Android 4.0.1 and MX Player, and the feature list was not coy about the pitch: full HD sources, absolutely free.

It was never on Google Play. You downloaded an APK from the developer's own site and sideloaded it, which by 2017 usually meant a Fire TV Stick plugged into the back of a television and an install pushed over the network. That distribution model is why it grew as fast as it did, and it is also why nobody has a real install number for it.

The developer went by NitroXenon and was reported in the press as a Hong Kong programmer named Peter Chan. The app's own documentation supports the location without meaning to: the subtitle services it shipped with included SubHD and Zimuku alongside OpenSubtitles, and the first two are Chinese-language sources.

On the evening of 10 September 2018 the app started showing a message from him saying he was shutting Terrarium TV down forever and that it would close itself at the end of the month. The official site posted the farewell on 11 September. By then most screens in the app were already returning No Data.

~ the record ~

~ the sideload ~

The device this app is remembered on was never part of my setup. A Fire TV Stick in the back of a television, an APK installed over the network and a free substitute for a cable package is an American and British living-room story, and the equivalent impulse here ran through IPTV subscriptions rather than through an Android app you flashed yourself.

What made Terrarium TV good, by the accounts of people who used it, is that it did not feel like a piracy tool. It had bookmarks and Chromecast support. It looked like a media app, and the only unusual step in installing it was turning on unknown sources first.

~ the goodbye ~

The shutdown notice was short and gave no reason past wanting to move on. TorrentFreak went looking for evidence of legal pressure and found none, which is not the same as there being none, because the Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment had by then made a habit of settling with app developers privately and quietly.

Then on 17 September 2018 he said something the first message had left out: that he could hand user information to authorities if they came asking. Nobody had asked him. It was a warning delivered to his own users a week after he had already turned the thing off.

~ the domain now ~

The site still resolves in 2026 and has carried the same page since 2018. It says the app has been shut down permanently and that any APK claiming to be Terrarium TV is not his and will harm your device. It says version 9.9.9 does not exist, a sentence written by somebody watching his own app name get reused for something worse.

Then it points visitors at JustWatch and at Get It Right, the British anti-piracy campaign, and recommends Netflix. The last line on the page is a farewell and a date, 11 September 2018. Eight years on, it is still the most complete primary account of what happened, because it is the only one the developer ever wrote.

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