User:Jimthing/TMDb

The Movie Database (TMDb) is a popular community-built movie and TV 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. 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.

History
Originally started as a side project to help serve high resolution fan art to users of Kodi (formerly XBMC) by sharing zip files, as sharing files by this method became cumbersome to maintain, Bell created "themoviedb.org - A wiki-based open movie database" 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. , the site contains around 300,000 movies, and continues to grow over time.

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.

Comparisons
Unlike the similar commercial website the IMDb (owned by Amazon.com), who charge large annual fees for customers to use their data, 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.

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. 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.

History
Originally started as a side project to help serve high resolution fan art to users of Kodi (formerly XBMC) by sharing zip files, as sharing files by this method became cumbersome to maintain, Bell created "themoviedb.org - A wiki-based open movie database" 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 it had a global Alexa Internet ranking of 2,218.

Some of the larger services of the site's data resources include: home theater software Plex, movie tracking site Letterboxd, news site Moviefone, and even the Australian Classification Board agency of the Australian Government's Department of Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development and Communications (DITRDC) – 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. 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. 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. The Fan TV service ceased operation in April 2018, after its technology was incorporated into the main TiVo functionality.

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

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.

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.

Data
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. , the site contains around 718,000 movies, and continues to grow over time.

Local language versions
TMDb's data can be translated to any language as users choose to contribute, with 39 languages officially supported, and 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.

The API has also frequently been used in data science study projects. 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.

Comparisons
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, 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. A leading source for metadata, TMDb has more than 200,000 developers and businesses using it.

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. 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.