User:Jimthing/TMDb
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Movie Database (TMDb) is a popular community-built movie and TV database.[1][2][3] Created by Travis Bell in 2008, unlike other commercial databases, TMDb is entirely crowd sourced.[4] 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.[5]
 | |
Type of site | Movie and TV show database |
|---|---|
| Created by | Travis Bell |
| URL | themoviedb.org |
| Commercial | No |
| Registration | Registration (optional, but required for user features and content editing) |
| Launched | September 2008 |
| Current status | Active |
History
Originally started as a side project to help serve high resolution fan art to users of Kodi (formerly XBMC) by sharing zip files,[6] as sharing files by this method became cumbersome to maintain, Bell created "themoviedb.org - A wiki-based open movie database"[7] 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
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[update], the site contains around 300,000 movies, and continues to grow over time.[4]
Local language versions
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.
API
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.[8]
Comparisons
Unlike the similar commercial website the IMDb (owned by Amazon.com), who charge large annual fees for customers to use their data,[9] 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.[10]
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.[11][12][13] 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.[14][15]
