INTERNET MOVIE DATABASE

Internet Movie Database:

Internet Movie Database (IMDb) is an online database of information related movies, television shows, actors, production crew personnel, video games and fictional characters featured in visual entertainment media. IMDb was launched on October 17, 1990, and in 1998 was acquired by Amazon.com.

On the web:

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 by Alan Jay. Later in the year, it moved onto the World Wide Web under the name of Cardiff Internet Movie Database.

The database resided on the servers of the computer science department of Cardiff University in the UK. 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 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 across the world with donated bandwidth.

 The website is Perl-based. As of May 2011, the site has been filtered in China for more than one year, although many netizens address it through proxy server or by VPN.

On October 17, 2010, IMDb launched original video (www.imdb.com/20) in celebration of its 20th anniversary.