The Internet Movie Database (IMDb) is an online database of information related to movies, actors, television shows, production crew personnel, video games, and most recently, fictional characters featured in visual entertainment media. IMDb launched on October 17, 1990, and in 1998 was acquired by Amazon.com Amazon.com, Inc. is an American-based multinational electronic commerce company. Headquartered in Seattle, Washington, it is America's largest online retailer, with nearly three times the Internet sales revenue of the runner up, Staples, Inc., as of January 2010.
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History
History before website
The IMDb originated from two lists started as independent projects in early 1989 by participants in the Usenet Duke University graduate students Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis conceived the idea in 1979 and it was established in 1980. Users read and post messages to one or more categories, known as newsgroups. Usenet resembles a bulletin board system (BBS) in many respects, and is the precursor to the various Internet forums that are widely used today; and can newsgroup A usenet newsgroup is a repository usually within the Usenet system, for messages posted from many users in different locations. The term may be confusing to some, because it is usually a discussion group. Newsgroups are technically distinct from, but functionally similar to, discussion forums on the World Wide Web. Newsreader software is used to rec.arts.movies. In each case, a single maintainer recorded items emailed by newsgroup readers, and posted updated versions of his list from time to time. The founding ideas of the database began with a posting titled "Those Eyes", on the subject of actresses with beautiful eyes. Hank Driskill began to collect a list of attractive actresses and what movies they had appeared in, and as the size of the repeated posting grew far beyond a normal newsgroup article, it soon became known simply as "THE LIST". (The first code to manage this list was a Perl Perl is a high-level, general-purpose, interpreted, dynamic programming language. Perl was originally developed by Larry Wall in 1987 as a general-purpose Unix scripting language to make report processing easier. Since then, it has undergone many changes and revisions and become widely popular amongst programmers. Larry Wall continues to oversee program written by Randal L. Schwartz Schwartz is the co-author of several widely used books about Perl, a programming language, and has written regular columns about Perl for several computer magazines. He popularized the Just another Perl hacker signature programs. He is a founding board member of the Perl Mongers, the worldwide Perl grassroots advocacy organization. Schwartz is to "invert the list", organizing the list by movies instead of actresses.[2]
The other project, started by Chuck Musciano, was briefly called the "Movie Ratings List" and soon became the "Movie Ratings Report". Musciano simply asked readers to rate movies on a scale of one to ten, and reported on the votes. He soon began posting "ballots" with lists of movies for people to rate, so his list also grew quickly.
In 1990, Col Needham Col Needham is the one of four founding partners of the Internet Movie Database (IMDb), and has served as General Manager of IMDb since its acquisition by Amazon.com in 1999 collated the two lists and produced a "Combined LIST & Movie Ratings Report".[3] (His first posting of the database scripts is not available.) Needham soon started a (male) "Actors List", while Dave Knight Dave Knight is an American slalom canoer who competed in the early 1970s. He won a gold medal in the mixed C-2 event at the 1973 ICF Canoe Slalom World Championships in Muotathal began a "Directors A film director is a person who directs the making or production of a film. Many people also consider film producers, cinematographers, film editors, and special effects experts to be filmmakers List", and Andy Krieg took over THE LIST, which would later be renamed as the "Actress List". Both this and the Actors List had been restricted to people who were still alive and working, but retired people began to be added, and Needham also started what was then (but did not remain) a separate "Dead Actors/Actresses List". The goal now was to make the lists as inclusive as the maintainers could manage. In late 1990, the lists included almost 10,000 movies and television series. On October 17, 1990, Needham posted a collection of Unix Unix is a computer operating system originally developed in 1969 by a group of AT&T employees at Bell Labs, including Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Brian Kernighan, Douglas McIlroy, and Joe Ossanna. Today's Unix systems are split into various branches, developed over time by AT&T as well as various commercial vendors and non-profit shell scripts A shell script is a script written for the shell, or command line interpreter, of an operating system. It is often considered a simple domain-specific programming language. Typical operations performed by shell scripts include file manipulation, program execution, and printing text which could be used to search the four lists, and the database that would become the IMDb was born. At the time, it was known as the "rec.arts.movies movie database".
On the web
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By 1992, 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. Later in the year, it moved onto the World Wide Web The World Wide Web, abbreviated as WWW and commonly known as the Web, is a system of interlinked hypertext documents accessed via the Internet. With a web browser, one can view web pages that may contain text, images, videos, and other multimedia and navigate between them by using hyperlinks. Using concepts from earlier hypertext systems, British (a network in its infancy back then) under the name of Cardiff Internet Movie Database. The database resided on the servers of the computer science department of Cardiff University Cardiff University is a university located in the Cathays Park area of Cardiff, Wales, United Kingdom. It received its Royal charter in 1883 and is a member of the Russell Group of Universities. The university is consistently recognised as providing the best university education in Wales. In the 2008 Research Assessment Exercise, almost 60 per in the UK. Rob Hartill Robert Hartill is a computer programmer and web designer best known for his work on the Internet Movie Database website and the Apache web server. Notable for playing a key role in the initial growth of the World Wide Web was the original web interface author. In 1994, the email interface was revised to accept the submission of all information, meaning that people no longer had to email the specific list maintainer with their updates. However, the structure remained 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. Its management also continued to be in the hands of a small contingent of underpaid or volunteer "section managers" who were receiving ever-growing quantities of information on films from around the world and across time from contributors of widely varying levels of expertise and informational resources. Despite the annual claims of Needham, in a year-end report newsletter to the Top 50 contributors, that "fewer holes" must now remain for the coming year, the amount of information still missing from the database was vastly underestimated. Over the next few years, the database was run on a network of mirrors In computing, a mirror is an exact copy of a data set. On the Internet, a mirror site is an exact copy of another Internet site. Mirror sites are most commonly used to provide multiple sources of the same information, and are of particular value as a way of providing reliable access to large downloads. Mirroring is a type of file synchronization across the world with donated bandwidth.
As an independent company
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In 1995, it became obvious to the principal site managers that the project had become too large to maintain merely through donations and in their spare time. The decision was made to become a commercial venture and in 1996, IMDb was incorporated in the United Kingdom, becoming the Internet Movie Database Ltd, with Col Needham the primary owner as well as identified figurehead. The section managers were offered "shares" in the company in exchange for the amount of work-time they put in, and sometimes for monetary donations by them. A couple of these went to work full time for salary, which Needham had already been drawing. General revenue for site operations was generated through advertising, licensing and partnerships.
This state of affairs continued until 1998. The database was growing every day, and it was again reaching a critical point in terms of quantity of data versus number of personnel, and the need for more full-time managers, who would of course want to be paid. Most revenues were being spent on equipment. The system was also suffering noticeable slowdowns both in accessing the site and in having new data posted. Offers were solicited from academic institutions but they were not interested; private enterprises with interests in the entertainment industry were also solicited, and from some of these offers were forthcoming to purchase IMDb. However, the shareholders were unwilling to sell if it could not be guaranteed that the information would be accessible to the internet community for free. None of this activity was made known to the several hundred volunteers who were contributing the vast majority of information now incoming to IMDb.
As a subsidiary company
A screenshot of IMDbPro in June 2008In 1998, Jeff Bezos Jeffrey Preston "Jeff" Bezos is the founder, president, chief executive officer and chairman of the board of Amazon.com. Bezos, a Tau Beta Pi graduate of Princeton University, worked as a financial analyst for D. E. Shaw & Co. before founding Amazon in 1994, founder, owner and CEO of Amazon.com, struck a deal with Col Needham and other principal shareholders to buy IMDb outright and attach it to Amazon as a subsidiary, private company.[4] This gave IMDb the ability to pay the shareholders salaries for their work, while Amazon.com would be able to use the IMDb as an advertising resource for selling DVDs and videotapes. Volunteer contributors were not advised in advance of even the possibility of IMDb—and their contributions along with it—being sold to a private business, which created some initial discord and defection of regulars.
IMDb continued to expand its functionality. In 2002 it added a subscription service known as IMDbPro aimed at entertainment professionals. It provides a variety of services including film production and box office details, as well as a company directory. Most information contained in the IMDb database proper continues to come from volunteer researchers.
As an additional incentive for users, as of 2003, if users are identified as being one of "the top 100 contributors" in terms of amounts of hard data submitted, they receive complimentary free access to IMDbPro for the following calendar year; for 2006 this was increased to the top 150 contributors, and for 2007 to the top 175. This incentive however is for overall contribution—not contribution on a nation by nation basis.[5][not in citation given] In 2008 IMDb launched their first official foreign language version with the German IMDb.de.
TV episodes
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On January 26, 2006, "Full Episode Support" came online, allowing the database to support separate cast and crew listings for each episode of every TV series. This was described by Col Needham as "the largest change we've ever made to our data model"[citation needed], and increased the number of titles in the database from 485,000 to nearly 755,000.
At present, the database entries for TV series are in a state of flux, as listings are migrated from series titles to individual episodes. The maintainers anticipated "a couple of months for data to settle down and bugs to be ironed out", but inaccuracies were still present one year later.
Characters filmography
On October 2, 2007 the characters filmography feature was launched. The feature is similar to the existing title, name and company feature, except now users can see by whom a certain character was played and can read a biography about the character and memorable quotes from them. All data in the characters filmography is submitted by regular users and is largely not verified by the IMDb staff, in contrast to most other data submitted to the site, which is first verified and might be rejected by the staff. This lack of oversight is acceptable, however, because very little new data is sent in; the majority of submissions consist of existing data being connected together.[6]
Instant viewing
On September 15, 2008, a feature was added that enables instant viewing of over 6,000 movies and television shows from CBS, Sony and a number of independent film makers, with direct links from their profiles.[7] Due to licensing restrictions this feature is only available to viewers in the United States.[8]
Ancillary features
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Fri, 18 Jun 2010 20:25:57 GMT+00:00
NewsOK.com (blog) For some interesting facts about the journey of this film, from concept to the big screen, read the Internet Movie Database's FAQ Content: The Voyage of ...
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