IMDb History

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IMDb History

Genesis

In the beginning, there was text. The early users of the internet looked upon it and saw that it was good. They used e-mail and also communicated with each other via Usenet, a series of bulletin/discussion boards shared across various networks and the internet.

On one of the newsgroups (a Usenet bulletin board) called rec.arts.movies, movie fans would gather to discuss movies and share knowledge. From the most common topics of discussion, they created FAQ's (Frequently Asked Questions lists). Gathered into four of these lists were credits for actors, actresses, directors, and biographical entries for movie makers who had passed on (also known as "the 'dead' list"). In October, 1990, these lists contained over 23,000 entries, covering nearly 10,000 movies and television series.

Our founder, and current managing director, Col Needham, looked upon this chaos and said "let there be searchability," and there was, and it was good. In less biblical terms... On October 17, 1990, he posted a set of Unix shell scripts that allowed these lists to be searched in combination and have meaningful results returned. These four lists and the scripts to search them were the Internet Movie Database: Episode I - The Text-Only Unix Version, known at that time as the "rec.arts.movies movie database."

The basic objective of the database was and remains to "provide useful and up to date movie information freely available online across as many platforms as possible." At the time of its inception, this meant platforms that used Unix. Later volunteer efforts would create versions of the basic database software for various platforms including DOS, OS/2 and even Amiga.

Remember, this was 1990... Windows was in its infancy, point and click internet access was years away, and the first publicly available "web browser" was yet to be created. The great majority of people accessing the internet did so through Unix shell accounts provided by their employers or universities. They knew how to actually give their computers written commands. Thus, for those on Unix systems, who knew their way around, setting up the shell scripts was not an incredibly difficult task.

These first scripts created a lot of excitement among the early users of the database. The excitement led to both new data and new categories. Writers, composers and cinematographers were the next additions, then came support in the database software for recording people's votes on films on a scale from 1-10.

Revolution

Though improvements were made to the software between 1990 and 1993 (such as the votes), the database remained fairly stable with the 7 main lists from 1990 until 1993. In 1993 various events lead to great upheaval and improvements in the way the Internet Movie Database collected and presented information, as well as the depth of information that made up the database.

Character names were added to the movie cast sections, support for trivia items, biographies, a crazy credits subsection of the trivia section, and plot summaries were added. As well, an automated e-mail interface for handling searches at a centralized database was created. The e-mail interface meant that for the first time, people didn't have to run their own copies of the database but could e-mail in their search requests and have the results mailed back. The e-mail interface is still running and is still used now, over 10 years later.

Around the time the e-mail server went live, plans for the first web version of the database began to take form. This was before the first widely-used graphical web browser, NCSA Mosaic, was even in its beta-testing stage. Though in retrospect, this was an incredibly visionary move, the people making it weren't looking at it from a business standpoint. They were primarily young students and programmers, just looking to push the envelope of their skills and talents. The web was new, it was exciting, and it was a challenge they wanted to meet.

The first web version of the database went live on the servers at Cardiff University in Wales. There is a fun bit of e-mail dating back to those days between web interface author, Rob Hartill, and Col Needham, both impressed when the web interface got 100 accesses in a single day. Prior to the latest redesign, the IMDb website has been serving an average of 65 million accesses from over 3.5 million visitors every month. With the improvements and new features added in the redesign, this could well go higher.

In April 1994, the IMDb took another step forward, centralizing the point for submitting information for the growing variety of lists. Prior to this, people wanting to submit information to the database had to find the name and e-mail address of the person(s) who maintained the particular list(s) that applied to the information they wanted to submit, and then had to send it to the appropriate listmanager(s). With the centralized e-mail interface, all the information could be submitted to one place.

Incorporation

The web site's usage had grown so large that the one server at Cardiff couldn't handle it all and by the start of 1995, there were copies/mirrors running on servers around the world, the e-mail interface for searches, the e-mail interface for additions, support for more platforms... But even more amazing was the influx of information. The database was getting more information submitted each week than was in the entire database at the end of 1990. Over the course of 1995, additional sections were added, software was written to help the people managing sections keep up with the loads of information they were having to process and check before authorizing its addition to the database, and a monthly newsletter was launched.

More importantly in 1995, two landmark events happened in the history of the database. Though the database had its roots in the rec.arts.movies Usenet newsgroup, it now worked within almost every level of internet communication. To reflect the range of its reach, the name was changed from the rec.arts.movies movie database to the Internet Movie Database. Also, the rapidly growing use of the database on the web was beginning to outpace the capacity of the equipment and internet bandwidth its supporters were willing/able to donate. In concert with the growing use, the growing amount of data being submitted was beginning to outpace the amount of time that the volunteers managing the databases sections could reasonably give.

Because of its growth out of the Usenet community, the mission statement to provide it for free to the users of the internet, and the strong anti-commercial sentiments as more corporate traffic and advertising moved online, deciding to turn the IMDb into a business was a very tough and debated decision. But the need to be able to support its growth, compete with new commercial projects and control its destiny made it obvious that the IMDb would have to incorporate. In late 1995 the decision was made to incorporate and in January of 1996 the IMDb was incorporated as became Internet Movie Database, Ltd.

Rather than go to a bunch of venture capitalists for millions and open up a big, glossy office in Silicon Valley, the shareholders of the Internet Movie Database were the people who helped create it and the database would have to survive on its income from advertising, licensing, and partnership deals. The team continued to work from their homes, with most continuing to hold their "day jobs" while working on the IMDb evenings and weekends, and a couple taking on full-time responsibility for the day to day management and operations.

The IMDb closed down the mirrors where they were given limited space and shared bandwidth, opening up their own dedicated servers with dedicated bandwidth in the U.S. and U.K. Despite fears expressed in the internal debates about incorporating, that they would suffer a huge anti-commercial backlash, there were surprisingly few complaints. As their capacity to serve their users increased, so did usage. Less than a year later, they had 9 servers in their U.S. installation, and would soon outgrow even that capacity.

An Amazon.com Company

In 1998, the database usage and the amount of data being submitted continued to grow. In 1997, the amount of data submitted that year alone was 100 times bigger than the first implementation of the database in October 1990, nearly a two-fold increase from 1995. Though income from advertising, licensing, and partnerships were able to keep the database afloat, it was still just scraping by without enough resources to add the staff it desperately needed to help lessen the burden on its overworked shareholders who saw so little income from their efforts, they might as well have still been volunteers.

Over time, they had been courted by bigger companies wanting to purchase the IMDb, but each time they shied away for fear that the companies would cannibalize it for the current data, put a price on it, and make it impossible for the IMDb to continue to fulfill its mission of serving the internet community without charging its visitors.

Then along came Jeff Bezos.

In Jeff Bezos, the people at the IMDb saw a kindred spirit, someone who understood the internet and its community, not just its potential as a marketplace, and thus when Jeff's people at amazon.com contacted them, they were willing to listen. What they heard was amazing, essentially "we want you to keep doing what you're doing."

Of course, amazon.com wasn't coming in as a white knight, throwing money at the IMDb in an altruistic gesture. Amazon had a plan to expand into selling video tapes and DVD's, and they saw the IMDb as a resource. There was an amazing amount of raw data in our files, great expertise and talent in our staff/shareholders, and millions of potential customers in our visitor traffic. A deal was struck for the IMDb to be purchased and become an amazon.com company, finally giving the people who had worked so hard on the database a real return on all the time they had invested.

A significant core of the IMDb's shareholders stayed on after the purchase. Now that the IMDb had the financial ability to pay salaries, a few of them who had been giving evenings and weekends to the project left their day jobs and came to work on the project full-time. Others who kept their Mon-Fri jobs were put on the payroll as part-timers. More staff was hired, though at a slow pace, bringing on additional people to assist with managing the data and free up some of the staff with strong programming skills to spend more time on site improvements.

Heading into later 1998, the IMDb, with new resources, planned a significant redesign of the web interface. The data wouldn't change, but they planned to better organize the data and improve navigation. Editorial features were implemented, such as a few columns, the Movie of the Day on the front page, our "Cool Today" page and daily newsletter with a daily movie quote, a celebrity birthdays blurb, and a daily trivia question.

And now, as we look back on our recently-passed ninth birthday and forward into our tenth year, the IMDb's mission has not changed: "provide useful and up to date movie information freely available online across as many platforms as possible." Our efforts remain dedicated to being not only the best, but the most useful entity on the internet for both hardcore and casual movie fans. In our latest redesign, we have upgraded and expanded the bulletin boards we implemented in May of 1999, added new content sections to help our users get better at-a-glance access to the most popular and exciting information in the database, put more fun items right on the front page, improved our search engine for finding information in the database, and are building our most comprehensive and easy-to-understand set of online help documentation to date, the IMDb University.

The IMDb didn't start as a dream to build a business or a web site. It started as a dream to make a tool that we, as movie fans, would find really useful and fun. Over the years, millions of other movie fans have found it useful and fun too. For the original shareholders who are now privileged enough to make a living from running and maintaining it, it is one of the great examples of "do what you love and the money will follow." We consider ourselves truly blessed to be a part of it and to share it with movie fans like you. Thank you ever so much for being a part of our dream.

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