The Movie Database
Type of site
Movie and TV show database
Created byTravis Bell
URLthemoviedb.org
CommercialNo
RegistrationRegistration (optional, but required for user features and content editing)
LaunchedSeptember 2008; 16 years ago (2008-09)
Current statusActive

The Movie Database (TMDb) is a popular community-built movie and TV database.[2][3][4] Created by Travis Bell in 2008, unlike other commercial databases, TMDb is entirely crowd sourced.[5] While initially known only for movie data, TV content was added in 2013. TMDb currently contains listings for 325,000 movies, over 65,000 TV shows, with over 865,000 people, around 1.5m images, and contributed from around 125,000 contributor edits per week—with these figures constantly growing as users continually add previously unlisted items to the site over time.[6]

History

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Originally started as a side project to help serve high resolution fan art to users of Kodi (formerly XBMC) by sharing zip files,[7] as sharing files by this method became cumbersome to maintain, Bell created "themoviedb.org - A wiki-based open movie database"[8] so that individual users could add and contribute content on their own.

The website has since gained further use by being one of the main suppliers of data to a number of other services, including Plex, Letterboxd, et al.

Data

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Since 2008, all data and images have been user contributed, with the site normally processing over 12,000 edits a day, and these contributions being moderated by a group of volunteer content moderators. As of October 2016, the site contains around 300,000 movies, and continues to grow over time.[5]

Local language versions

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TMDb's data can be translated to any language as users choose to contribute, with fully localized versions of the website being available in English, German, French, Greek, Spanish, Portuguese, Romanian, and Chinese, among others.

Non-commercial entities gain free access to the TMDb application programming interface (API), with it providing access to all data in every supported language. Users of TMDb have been known to contribute software development kits (SDKs) which makes integration with TMDb easier.[9]

Comparisons

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Unlike the similar commercial website the IMDb (owned by Amazon.com), who charge large annual fees for customers to use their data,[10] TMDb's open nature, means many movie and TV sites can access and use its data, including individual users of media management software such as Plex, Kodi, and others.[11]

TMDb gained large interest when in late February 2017, the IMDb gave around two weeks notice of the complete removal of the message boards functionality from their site, including all the historical postings data.[12][13][14] Following the fallout, large numbers of their message board users found TMDb, as chief programmer Bell immediately expanded upon the previously basic incorporated message board functionality for each object on the site (movie, TV series/episode, company, person) to quickly help users continue conversing about movie and TV related subjects.[15][16]

References

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  1. ^ "The Movie Database (TMDb) Site Info". Alexa Internet. Retrieved 2017-02-25.
  2. ^ Das, Kedar Nath; Das, Debasish; Ray, Anjan Kumar; Suganthan, Ponnuthurai Nagaratnam (2022). Proceedings of the International Conference on Computational Intelligence and Sustainable Technologies: ICoCIST 2021. Springer Nature. ISBN 978-981-16-6893-7.
  3. ^ Ranganathan, G.; Chen, Joy; Rocha, Álvaro (2020-09-24). Inventive Communication and Computational Technologies: Proceedings of ICICCT 2020. Springer Nature. ISBN 978-981-15-7345-3.
  4. ^ Kapoor, Nimish; Vishal, Saurav; K. S., Krishnaveni (2020). "Movie Recommendation System Using NLP Tools". 2020 5th International Conference on Communication and Electronics Systems (ICCES): 883–888. doi:10.1109/ICCES48766.2020.9137993.
  5. ^ a b "How is TMDb different from IMDB?". Quora. January 23, 2012. Retrieved 2016-10-18.
  6. ^ "About TMDb – The Movie Database". TMDb. Retrieved 2017-02-28.
  7. ^ "Meligrove.com - Movies and Music Artists FanArt Backdrops". Kodi. August 17, 2008. Retrieved 2017-02-25.
  8. ^ "themoviedb.org (TMDb) - The Open Movie Database". Kodi. October 9, 2008. Retrieved 2017-02-25.
  9. ^ "The Movie Database (TMDb) API - Libraries". The Programmable Web. October 19, 2016. Retrieved 2017-02-25.
  10. ^ "Use the IMDb rather than or in addition to themoviedb.org for accepted movies". Letterboxd. February 20, 2013. Retrieved 2017-02-25.
  11. ^ "Agents - Plex". Plex. Retrieved 2017-02-25.
  12. ^ Lara Williams (February 17, 2017). "Why IMDb should rethink the decision to close its message boards". The Guardian. Retrieved 2017-02-25.
  13. ^ Col Needham (February 20, 2017). "IMDb Message Boards - IMDb". IMDb. Retrieved 2017-02-25.
  14. ^ "Film site IMDB to shut down message boards". BBC online. BBC. February 6, 2017. Retrieved 2017-02-25.
  15. ^ Travis Bell (February 16, 2017). "A great disturbance in the Force". The Movie Database. Retrieved 2017-02-25.
  16. ^ "The IMDB message boards are officially dead. Are there any worthy replacements". February 20, 2017. Retrieved 2017-02-25.
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Category:Entertainment Internet forums Category:Film websites Category:Film review websites Category:Online databases Category:Online film databases Category:Recommender systems Category:Social cataloging applications Category:Television websites Category:American websites Category:Entertainment companies established in 2008 Category:Internet properties established in 2008


________________________________


The Movie Database
 
Type of site
Database (Movie and TV show)
Created byTravis Bell
CommercialNo
RegistrationOptional (but required for user features and content editing)
LaunchedSeptember 2008; 16 years ago (2008-09)
Current statusActive

The Movie Database (better known simply as TMDb) is a free and open sourced movie and TV show database. Created by Travis Bell in 2008, unlike other commercial databases, TMDb is entirely crowd sourced. While initially known only for movie data, TV content was added in 2013.[1][2]

TMDb currently contains listings for around 718,000 movies, over 123,000 TV shows, with over 2.3m people, around 3.1m images, and contributed from more than 300,000 contributor edits per week—with these figures constantly growing as users continually add previously unlisted items to the site over time.[3]

History

edit

Originally started as a side project to help serve high resolution fan art to users of Kodi (formerly XBMC) by sharing zip files,[4] as sharing files by this method became cumbersome to maintain, Bell created "themoviedb.org - A wiki-based open movie database"[5] so that individual users could add and contribute content on their own.

The website has since gained further use by being one of the main suppliers of data to a number of other services, and as of January 2022 it had a global Alexa Internet ranking of 2,218.[6]

Some of the larger services of the site's data resources include: home theater software Plex,[7] movie tracking site Letterboxd,[8] news site Moviefone,[9] and even the Australian Classification Board agency of the Australian Government's Department of Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development and Communications (DITRDC)[10] – many featuring The Movie Database attribution notices on the bottom of their sites webpages.

In late 2014, TV listings provider Rovi Corporation bought Fanhattan, LLC, who traded as Fan TV.[11] Fan TV had previously bought The Movie Database from owner Bell in 2010. However, Bell has stayed in charge of the site throughout, and remains employed under contract through Fan TV to oversee improvements and running of the site.[12] In April 2016, Rovi itself went on to buy TiVo Inc., with the combined company operating under the TiVo brand until December 2019, when they merged with technology IP licensing business Xperi.[13][14] The Fan TV service ceased operation in April 2018, after its technology was incorporated into the main TiVo functionality.[15]

In 2015, long-running British movie magazine Empire also started using data from TMDb to deliver data to parts of their website.[16]

In January 2021, media company Trakt.tv announced plans to transition from TheTVDB to using TMDb's data as the primary data source for TV shows within their product, with missing sections tracked and corrected over nightly data refreshes.[17]

In August 2021, company Firecore announced a new version of their media player, Infuse 7.1, which now also used TMDb's data for both movie and TV show as the primary data source for their player software.[18]

Data

edit

Since 2008, all data and images have been user contributed, with the site normally processing over 40,000 edits a day, and these contributions being moderated by a group of volunteer content moderators. As of December 2021, the site contains around 718,000 movies, and continues to grow over time.[2]

Local language versions

edit

TMDb's data can be translated to any language as users choose to contribute, with 39 languages officially supported,[19] and fully localized versions of the website being available in English, German, French, Greek, Spanish, Portuguese, Romanian, and Chinese, among others.

Non-commercial entities gain free access to the TMDb application programming interface (API), with it providing access to all data in every supported language. Users of TMDb have been known to contribute software development kits (SDKs) which makes integration with TMDb easier.[20]

The API has also frequently been used in data science study projects.[21] One example has been Kaggle, a data science subsidiary of Google, who since 2017 have used a 5000 movie subset from TMDb in order to do data analysis of said subject matter.[22][23]

Comparisons

edit

Unlike the similar commercial website the IMDb (Internet Movie Database), owned by Amazon.com, who charge large annual fees for customers to use their data,[8] TMDb's open nature, means many movie and TV sites can access and use its data, including individual users of media management software such as Plex, Kodi, and others.[7] A leading source for metadata, TMDb has more than 200,000 developers and businesses using it.[19]

TMDb gained large interest when in late February 2017, the IMDb gave around two weeks notice of the complete removal of the message boards functionality from their site, including all the historical postings data.[24][25][26][27] Following the fallout, large numbers of their message board users found TMDb, as chief programmer Bell immediately expanded upon the previously basic incorporated message board functionality for each object on the site (movie, TV series/episode, company, person) to quickly help users continue conversing about movie and TV related subjects.[28][29][30]

See also

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References

edit
  1. ^ "The Movie Database". StreamingSites. Retrieved 2021-11-21.
  2. ^ a b "How is TMDb different from IMDB?". Quora. January 23, 2012. Retrieved 2021-12-21.
  3. ^ "About TMDb – The Movie Database". TMDb. Retrieved 2021-12-21.
  4. ^ "Meligrove.com - Movies and Music Artists FanArt Backdrops". Kodi. August 17, 2008. Retrieved 2021-12-21.
  5. ^ "themoviedb.org (TMDb) - The Open Movie Database". Kodi. October 9, 2008. Retrieved 2021-12-21.
  6. ^ "The Movie Database (TMDb) Site Info". Alexa Internet. January 6, 2022. Retrieved 2022-01-07.
  7. ^ a b "Agents - Plex". Plex. Retrieved 2021-12-21.
  8. ^ a b "Use the IMDb rather than or in addition to themoviedb.org for accepted movies". Letterboxd. February 20, 2013. Retrieved 2017-02-25.
  9. ^ "Moviefone - Find it. Watch it". Moviefone. Retrieved 2022-01-07.
  10. ^ "Spider-Man: No Way Home - Australian Classification". Australian Classification. December 7, 2021. Retrieved 2022-01-07.
  11. ^ "Rovi Acquires Content Discovery and Navigation Innovator Fanhattan". rovi.com. 2014-11-03. Archived from the original on 2014-11-06. Retrieved 2014-11-03.
  12. ^ Jason Abbruzzese / Associated Press (April 29, 2016). "Tivo, which still exists, just got bought for $1.1 billion". Mashable. Retrieved 2021-12-22.
  13. ^ "Xperi and TiVo Complete Merger". www.businesswire.com. June 1, 2020. Archived from the original on July 19, 2020. Retrieved 2020-07-19.
  14. ^ Spangler, Todd (December 19, 2019). "TiVo to Merge With Entertainment-Tech Firm Xperi in $3 Billion Deal". Variety. Retrieved 2021-12-29.
  15. ^ Alderson, Adam (April 10, 2018). "TiVo Will No Longer Support Fan TV App Soon". Digital TV Life. Retrieved 2021-12-29.
  16. ^ Green, Willow (September 1, 2015). "TMDB API - News - Empire". Empire. Retrieved 2022-01-07.
  17. ^ "We're switching to TMDb as the primary data source for TV shows - Trakt". Medium. January 18, 2021. Retrieved 2021-12-22.
  18. ^ James (August 17, 2021). "Infuse 7.1 - Supercharged Metadata - Metadata powered by TMDB - Firecore". Firecore. Retrieved 2021-12-22.
  19. ^ a b Ranganathan, G. (September 24, 2020). Joy Chen, Álvaro Rocha (ed.). Inventive Communication and Computational Technologies - Proceedings of ICICCT 2020. This book gathers selected papers presented at the 4th International Conference on Inventive Communication and Computational Technologies (ICICCT 2020), held on 28-29 May 2020 at Gnanamani College of Technology, Tamil Nadu, India. Springer Nature. p. 123. ISBN 978-9811573446. Retrieved 2021-12-29.
  20. ^ "The Movie Database (TMDb) API - Libraries". The Programmable Web. October 19, 2016. Retrieved 2021-12-21.
  21. ^ "Import Movie Database (TMDb) Data to Google Sheets". MixedAnalytics. January 24, 2021. Retrieved 2021-12-22.
  22. ^ "TMDB 5000 Movie Dataset". Kaggle. Retrieved 2021-12-22.
  23. ^ "Grab some popcorn: Analysis of The Movie DataBase (TMDB)". Suresh Karthik Balasundaram. April 30, 2018. Retrieved 2021-12-22.
  24. ^ "The Movie Database". AlternativeTo.net. August 18, 2021. Retrieved 2021-12-21.
  25. ^ Lara Williams (February 17, 2017). "Why IMDb should rethink the decision to close its message boards". The Guardian. Retrieved 2021-12-21.
  26. ^ Col Needham (February 20, 2017). "IMDb Message Boards - IMDb". IMDb. Retrieved 2017-02-25.
  27. ^ "Film site IMDB to shut down message boards". BBC online. BBC. February 6, 2017. Retrieved 2021-12-21.
  28. ^ Basu, Saikat (May 23, 2018). "The Best Alternative to IMDb Is... The Movie Database". Make Use Of. Retrieved 2021-12-22.
  29. ^ Travis Bell (February 16, 2017). "A great disturbance in the Force". The Movie Database. Retrieved 2021-12-21.
  30. ^ "The IMDB message boards are officially dead. Are there any worthy replacements". February 20, 2017. Retrieved 2021-12-21.
edit
  • The Movie Database (TMDb) – official site


Category:Entertainment Internet forums Category:Film websites Category:Film review websites Category:Online databases Category:Online film databases Category:Recommender systems Category:Social cataloging applications Category:Television websites Category:American websites Category:Entertainment companies established in 2008 Category:Internet properties established in 2008