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Internet Movie Database
URL www.imdb.com
Commercial? Yes
Type of site Online movie, TV, and video game databases
Registration Optional
Available language(s): English
Owner Amazon.com
Created by Col Needham
Launched October 17, 1990
Current status Active
The Internet Movie Database (IMDb) is an online database of information
about movies, actors, television shows, production crew personnel, and video
games. IMDb began on October 17, 1990 and in 1998 it was acquired by
Amazon.com.
Overview
The IMDb website consists of the largest accumulation of user based data
about films, television programs, direct-to-video products, and video games
reaching back to each medium's respective beginning, and spanning content of
origin from around the world. In many cases, the information goes beyond
simple title or press credits to include complete cast and crew credits,
uncredited personnel, production and distribution companies, plot summaries,
memorable quotes, awards, reviews, box office performance, filming
locations, technical specs, promotional content, trivia, and links to
official and other websites. Furthermore, the IMDb tracks titles (sometimes
erroneously) in production, and even major, announced projects still in
development. The database also houses filmographies for all persons, cast
and crew, identified in listed titles. Filmographies include biographical
details, awards listings, external links, and information about other
professional work not covered by title entries in the database such as
theatrical and commercial advertising appearances. The IMDb also offers
ancillary material such as daily movie and TV news, weekly box office
reports, TV listings, cinema showtimes, user polls and ratings, and special
features about various movie events such as the Academy Awards. The website
also has an active message board system. There are message boards for each
database entry, found at the bottom of each respective page, as well as
general discussion boards on various topics. Many of these are quite heated
and sometimes slump into endless pages of insults very easily due to the
nature of their message board system.
The IMDb is a free site, which requires registration to access its complete
range of data and activities, although verification can sometimes require
personal financial information such as credit card details. Any person with
an e-mail account and a web browser that accepts cookies can set up an
account with IMDb that allows them to submit information and engage in other
site activities. Site visitors wishing only to view information without
accessing interactive features can do so without registration. Database
content is largely provided and updated by a cadre of volunteer
contributors; although 20 members of the IMDb staff are dedicated to
monitoring received data.[1] For automated queries, most of the database can
be downloaded as compressed plain text files and the information can be
extracted using the tools provided, typically using a command line
interface.[2]
In 2002, the IMDb spun off a private, subscription-funded site, IMDbPro,
offering the entire content of the database plus additional information for
business professionals, such as personnel contact details, movie event
calendars, and a greater range of industry news.
History
The database originated from two lists started as independent projects in
early 1989 by participants in the Usenet newsgroup 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. Google Groups
coverage of rec.arts.movies is incomplete during the relevant time period,
with a 6-month gap in late 1988 and early 1989 and a number of missing
articles after that.
It began with a posting titled "Those Eyes", on the subject of actresses
with beautiful eyes. Hank Driskill began to collect a list of sexy 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 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 collated the two lists and produced a "Combined LIST &
Movie Ratings Report".[3] (His first posting of the database scripts is not
available.) Now the ball really started rolling. Needham soon started a
(male) "Actors List", while Dave Knight began a "Directors 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 shell scripts 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
By 1993, 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 to the World Wide Web (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 in Wales. Rob Hartill 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 level of expertise and
informational resources. Despite the annual claims of Needham, in a year-end
report newsletter to the Top fifty 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 across the world with donated bandwidth.
As an independent company
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 remaining shareholders were the people maintaining the database. Revenue
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. Most revenues were being
spent on equipment, and there was not enough money left over to pay full
time salaries. The system was also suffering noticeable slowdowns both in
accessing the site and in having new data posted. Offers were solicited and
received from major businesses to purchase the database; 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.
As a subsidiary company
In 1998, Jeff Bezos, 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 his corporate empire 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 continues 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 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. An additional incentive, since
2003, is that if they 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.[5]
TV episodes
On 26 January 2006, the long-awaited "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," and increased the number
of titles in the database from 485,000 to nearly 750,000.
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.
Ancillary features
User ratings of films
As one adjunct to data, the IMDb offers a rating scale which allows users to
rate films by choosing one of ten categories in the range 1–10, with each
user able to submit one rating. The points of reference given to users of
these categories are the descriptions "1 (awful)" and "10 (excellent)"; and
these are the only descriptions of categories. Due to the minimum category
being scored one, the mid-point of the range of scores is 5.5, rather than
5.0 as might intuitively be expected given a maximum score of ten. This
rating system has also recently been implemented for television programming
on an episode-by-episode basis.
In adopting this method, IMDb is following its widespread usage; the method
is the same as rating in the range of a half star to five stars. When used
in reviews by a single reviewer, the method has some basic utility given a
rating is usually given in the context of a qualitative appraisal of the
film. The simplicity of this method makes it popular, but in terms of
psychometric, statistical, and other criteria, the method suffers
shortcomings (see online rating scales).
Filters and weights
IMDb indicates that submitted ratings are filtered and weighted in various
ways in order to produce a weighted mean that is displayed for each film,
series, and so on. It states that filters are used to avoid vote stuffing;
the method is not described in detail to avoid attempts to circumvent it.
Ranking
The IMDb Top 250 is intended to be a listing of the top 'rated' 250 films,
based on ratings by the registered users of the website using the methods
described.[6] Only non-documentary theatrical releases running at least
forty-five minutes with over 1300 ratings are considered; all other products
are ineligible[7]. Also, the 'top 250' rating is based on only the ratings
of "regular voters" (IMDb does not define this term). In addition to other
weightings, the top 250 films are also based on a weighted rating formula
referred to in actuarial science as a credibility formula.[8] This label
arises because a statistic is taken to be more credible the greater the
number of individual pieces of information; in this case from eligible users
who submit ratings. IMDb uses the following formula to calculate the
weighted rating:
W = R{v\over v+m} + C{m\over v+m}\ where:
W\ = Weighted Rating
R\ = average for the movie as a number from 0 to 10 (mean) = (Rating)
v\ = number of votes for the movie = (votes)
m\ = minimum votes required to be listed in the Top 250 (currently 1300)
C\ = the mean vote across the whole report (currently 6.7)
An extended listing of the Top 500 - following the same formula - is
available to IMDbPro subscribers.
The IMDb also has a Bottom 100 feature which is assembled in the same
way.[9] Although the Top 250 films generally do not shift much (the "great"
films are typically better known, and therefore have a high number of votes
and a higher popularity inertia) the "winner" of the Bottom one hundred
changes frequently. A disproportionate number of "Bottom 100" films were
featured on Mystery Science Theater 3000, which is said to be a result of an
MST3K website encouraging all its users to register with IMDb and vote "1"
on films featured on the show, during IMDb's early years.[citation needed]
The top 250 list comprises a wide strata of films, including major releases,
cult films, independent films, critically acclaimed films, silent films and
foreign films. Nevertheless, there are issues associated with compiling such
lists of rankings which arise from the shortcomings of the approach to
ratings.[citation needed]
Since the website is primarily accessed in western cultures, the Top 250 may
be skewed as such, evident by the fact that there are no Bollywood pictures
in it. Also, the people most likely to use the site to vote regularly would
be more internet savvy, and may have common tastes in films. Films aimed at
audiences not in this demographic are absent from the list, including
Titanic, the highest grossing film of all time, and all the Harry Potter
films, a very successful film franchise.[10]
Plot keywords
Plot keywords are keywords that contributors to the IMDb submit. These are
keywords regarding objects and occurrences in each film on the IMDb.[11]
Message boards
One of the most used features of the Internet Movie Database is the Message
Boards that coincide with every database entry, along with forty-seven Main
Boards. These boards allow registered users to share, discuss and debate
information about the movie and/or people that worked on it. They were not
originally part of the IMDb, but were added only after its purchase by
Amazon.com, some time in the year 2000.
Star Talk (celebrities and film professionals), General Boards
(miscellaneous and non-film-related topics), Video Games (video games and
its institutional context) and IMDb Help (anything pertaining directly to
the site itself). As the IMDb expires older posts from all message boards
variably, it is difficult to precisely measure traffic according to
individual board, but the Soapbox and the Sandbox are amongst the highest
traffic boards on IMDb. The Soapbox is a general purpose discussion board,
where users can go for "their more heated discussions".[12] The Sandbox is a
general purpose, anything-goes board designated for test messages and
off-topic posts.[13]
Boards for various political persons (most notably President George W. Bush)
have also been used for political discusssion. On May 9, 2007, a "Politics"
message board was created.[14]
My movies
Registered users also have access to "my movies," which is a database that
can be created by any registered user.[15] The user can sort the content of
that database according to several criteria, such as vote history. [16]
Copyright issues
All volunteers who contribute content to the database retain copyright to
their contributions but grant full rights to copy, modify, and sublicense
the content to IMDb. IMDb in turn does not allow others to use movie
summaries or actor biographies without written permission.
References
1. ^ Meet the staff. IMDb. Retrieved on 2007-06-07.
2. ^ Alternate Interfaces. IMDb. Retrieved on 2007-01-15.
3. ^ MRRLIST: Combined LIST & Movie Ratings Report. Google Inc.. Retrieved
on 2007-01-15.
4. ^ News Release. PR Newswire Europe Ltd.. Retrieved on 2007-01-15.
5. ^ IMDb announcement: Top 150 Contributors for 2006. IMDb messageboard
posting (requires registration). Retrieved on 2007-07-15.
6. ^ "Top 250 movies as voted by our users", IMDb. Retrieved on 2007-03-01.
7. ^ "Types of titles excluded from the Top 250", IMDb. Retrieved on
2007-04-25.
8. ^ Ragnar Norberg, Department of Statistics. "Credibility Theory" (.PDF).
London School of Economics. Retrieved on 2007-03-01.
9. ^ "Bottom 100", IMDb. Retrieved on 2007-03-01.
10. ^ Worldwide Box office
11. ^ Submission Guide: Keywords. IMDb. Retrieved on 2007-03-01.
12. ^ "The Soapbox", IMDb. Retrieved on 2007-03-01.
13. ^ "The Sandbox", IMDb. Retrieved on 2007-03-01.
14. ^ Board: Politics
15. ^ What Is IMDb's My Movies service?. IMDb. Retrieved on 2007-01-15.
16. ^ How do I create a personalized movie list with My Movies?. IMDb.
Retrieved on 2007-01-15.
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