IMDb
IMDb (an acronym for Internet Movie Database)[2] is an online database of information related to films, television series, podcasts, home videos, video games, and streaming content online – including cast, production crew and personal biographies, plot summaries, trivia, ratings, and fan and critical reviews. IMDb began as a fan-operated movie database on the Usenet group "rec.arts.movies" in 1990, and moved to the Web in 1993. Since 1998, it has been owned and operated by IMDb.com, Inc., a subsidiary of Amazon.
For the database system, see In-memory database. For the Malaysian sovereign wealth fund, see 1MDB.
Type of site
The site's message boards were disabled in February 2017. As of 2019, IMDb was the 52nd most visited website on the Internet, as ranked by Alexa.[3] As of March 2022, the database contained some 10.1 million titles (including television episodes), 11.5 million person records, and 83 million registered users.[4]
History[edit]
Pre-website[edit]
IMDb originated in 1990 with a Usenet posting entitled "Those Eyes", by the English film fan and computer programmer Col Needham,[25] about actresses with beautiful eyes. Others with similar interests soon responded with additions or different lists of their own. Needham subsequently started an "Actors List", while Dave Knight began a "Directors List", and Andy Krieg took over "THE LIST" from Hank Driskill, which would later be renamed the "Actress List". Both lists had been restricted to people who were alive and working, but soon retired people were added, so Needham started what was then (but did not remain) a separate "Dead Actors/Actresses List". Steve Hammond started collecting and merging character names for both the actors and actresses lists. When these achieved popularity, they were merged back into the lists themselves. The goal of the participants now was to make the lists as inclusive as possible.
By late 1990, the lists included almost 10,000 films and television series, correlated with actors and actresses appearing therein. On October 17, 1990, Needham developed and posted a collection of Unix shell scripts that could be used to search the four lists, and thus the database that would become the IMDb was born.[26] At the time, it was known as the "rec.arts.movies movie database".
On the Web[edit]
The database had been expanded to include additional categories of filmmakers and other demographic material as well as trivia, biographies, and plot summaries. The movie ratings had been properly integrated with the list data, and a centralized email interface for querying the database had been created by Alan Jay. Later, on August 5, 1993,[27] it moved onto the fledgling World Wide Web under the name of Cardiff Internet Movie Database.[28] The database resided on the servers of the computer science department of Cardiff University in Wales. Rob Hartill was the original web interface author. In 1994, the email interface was revised to accept the submission of all information, which enabled people to email the specific list maintainer with their updates. However, the structure remained so that information received on a single film was divided among multiple section managers, the sections being defined and determined by categories of film personnel and the individual filmographies contained therein. Over the next few years, the database was run on a network of mirrors across the world with donated bandwidth.[29]
As Amazon.com subsidiary (1998–present)[edit]
In 1998, Jeff Bezos, founder, owner, and CEO of Amazon.com, struck a deal with Needham and other principal shareholders to buy IMDb outright; Amazon paid $55 million for IMDb and two other companies.[31] Bezos attached it to Amazon as a subsidiary, private company.[32] This gave IMDb the ability to pay the shareholders salaries for their work. In the process of expanding its product line, Amazon.com intended to use IMDb as an advertising resource for selling DVDs and videotapes.
IMDb continued to expand its functionality. On January 15, 2002, it added a subscription service known as IMDbPro, aimed at entertainment professionals. IMDbPro was announced and launched at the 2002 Sundance Film Festival by Barnaby Dorfman. It provides a variety of services including film production and box office details, a company directory, and the ability of subscribers to add personal information pages.
From 1996 onwards, an annual newsletter email (archived on the website) has been sent from Col Needham to contributors on the first day of each calendar year. The annual newsletter lists various information about the past year on the site, including stats, top contributors tally for the year (the top 300 users, currently; fewer in previous years), and a perspective on the site's progress and future.[33][34][35]
As an additional incentive for users, as of 2003, users identified as one of the "top 100 contributors" of hard data received complimentary free access to IMDbPro for the following calendar year; for 2006 this was increased to the top 150 contributors, and for 2010 to the top 250.[36]
In 2008, IMDb launched their first official foreign-language version with IMDb.de, in German. Also in 2008, IMDb acquired two other companies: Withoutabox[37] and Box Office Mojo.[38]
The website was originally Perl-based, but IMDb no longer discloses what software it uses for reasons of security, apart from mentioning The Apache Software Foundation.[39] In 2010, the site was filtered in China.[40]
In 2016, The IMDb Studio at Sundance was launched, a talk show that is presented on IMDb and YouTube.[41][42]
In April 2017, IMDb celebrated its 25th anniversary. As of that year, Needham was still managing IMDb from its main office in Bristol in the Castlemead office tower.[43]
In January 2019, IMDb launched an ad-supported streaming service called Freedive.[44] This was the company's second attempt at a streaming service; it launched a similar service in 2008.[45][46] In June 2019, Freedive was rebranded as IMDb TV.[47] In April 2022, the service was rebranded again as Amazon Freevee.[48]
Content and format[edit]
Data provided by subjects[edit]
In 2006, IMDb introduced its "Résumé Subscription Service", where an actor or crew member can post their résumé and upload photos[49] for a yearly fee.[50] IMDb résumé pages are kept on a sub-page of the regular entry about that person, with a regular entry automatically created for each résumé subscriber who does not already have one.[51]
As of 2012, Resume Services was included as part of an IMDbPro subscription and is no longer offered as a separate subscription service.
Copyright, vandalism and error issues[edit]
Volunteers who contribute content to the database technically retain copyright on their contributions, but the compilation of the content becomes the exclusive property of IMDb with the full right to copy, modify, and sublicense it, and they are verified before posting.[52] However, credit is not given on specific title or filmography pages to the contributor(s) who have provided information. Conversely, a credited text entry, such as a plot summary, may be corrected for content, grammar, sentence structure, perceived omission or error, by other contributors without having to add their names as co-authors. Due to the time required for processing submitted data or text before it is displayed, IMDb is different from user-contributed projects like Discogs, or OpenStreetMap, or Wikipedia, in that contributors cannot add, delete, or modify the data or text on impulse, and the manipulation of data is controlled by IMDb technology and salaried staff.[53]
IMDb has been subject to deliberate additions of false information; in 2012 a spokesperson said: "We make it easy for users and professionals to update much of our content, which is why we have an 'edit page'. The data that is submitted goes through a series of consistency checks before it goes live. Given the sheer volume of the information, occasional mistakes are inevitable, and, when reported, they are promptly fixed. We always welcome corrections."[54]
The Java Movie Database (JMDB)[55] is reportedly creating an IMDb_Error.log file that lists all the errors found while processing the IMDb plain text files. A Wiki alternative to IMDb is Open Media Database[56] whose content is also contributed by users but licensed under a Creative Commons license (CC BY) and the GFDL. Since 2007, IMDb has been experimenting with wiki-programmed sections for complete film synopses, parental guides, and FAQs about titles as determined by (and answered by) individual contributors.
Data format and access[edit]
IMDb, unlike other AI-automated queries, does not provide an API for automated queries. However, most of the data can be downloaded as compressed plain text files and the information can be extracted using the command-line interface tools provided.[57] There is also a Java-based graphical user interface (GUI) application available that is able to process the compressed plain text files, which allows a search and a display of the information.[55] This GUI application supports different languages, but the movie related data are in English, as made available by IMDb. A Python package called IMDbPY (since renamed cinemagoer) can also be used to process the compressed plain text files into a number of different SQL databases, enabling easier access to the entire dataset for searching or data mining.[58][59][60]
Film titles[edit]
The IMDb has sites in English as well as versions translated completely or in part into other languages (Danish, Finnish, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Spanish and Romanian). The non-English language sites display film titles in the specified language. Originally, IMDb's English language sites displayed titles according to their original country-of-origin language, however, in 2010 IMDb began allowing individual users in the UK and US to choose primary title display by either the original-language titles, or the US or UK release title (normally, in English).
Podcasts[edit]
On October 21, 2021, the site added the ability to add podcasts (both as series and episodes) as titles to the site, via an IMDb employee announcement on their Sprinklr forums.[61] As of December 2022, the numbers of podcast series stood at 24,778, with podcast episodes at 3,076,386.[4]
Legal and policy issues[edit]
In 2011, in the case of Hoang v. Amazon.com, Inc., IMDb was sued by an anonymous actress for at least US$1,075,000 because the movie website publicly disclosed her age (40, at the time) without her consent.[62] The actress claimed that revealing her age could cause her to lose acting opportunities.[63] Judge Marsha J. Pechman, a US district judge in Seattle, dismissed the lawsuit, saying the actress had no grounds to proceed with an anonymous complaint. The actress re-filed and so revealed that she was Huong Hoang of Texas, who uses the stage name Junie Hoang.[64] In 2013, Pechman dismissed all causes of action except for a breach of contract claim against IMDb; a jury then sided with IMDb on that claim.[65] The Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit affirmed the district court judgment in March 2015.[66]
Also in 2011, in the case of United Video Properties Inc., et al. v. Amazon.Com Inc. et al.,[67] IMDb and Amazon were sued by Rovi Corporation and others for patent infringement over their various program listing offerings.[68] The patent claims were ultimately construed in a way favorable to IMDb, and Rovi / United Video Properties lost the case.[69] In April 2014, the decision was affirmed by the U.S. Court of Appeals.[70]
On January 1, 2017, the State of California enacted state bill AB-1687, a SAG-AFTRA-backed anti-ageism statute which requires "commercial online entertainment employment services" to honor requests by their subscribers for their ages and birthdays to be hidden.[71] By the beginning of 2017, IMDb had received more than 2,300 requests from individuals to remove their date of birth from the site. Included in this group were 10 Academy Award winners and another 71 nominated for Oscars, Emmys, or Golden Globes.[72] On February 23, 2017, Judge Vince Girdhari Chhabria issued a stay on the bill pending a further trial, on the ground that it possibly violated the First Amendment because it inhibited the public consumption of information. He also questioned the intent of the bill, as it was ostensibly meant to target IMDb.[73] In February 2018, Chhabria struck down the statute,[74] and in June 2020, the Ninth Circuit affirmed Chhabria's judgement, holding that the statute was an unconstitutional content-based restriction that violated the First Amendment.[75][76]
IMDb had long maintained that it would keep all valid information, but changed that policy related to birth names in 2019, instead removing birth names that are not widely and publicly known, of persons who no longer use their birth names.[77] This was done in response to pressure from LGBTQ groups against the publication of the birth names of transgender people without their consent (deadnaming). Any name a person had previously been credited under, however, continues to be maintained in the credits section.[77]