IMDb Full Form

Meaning of IMDb

IMDb stands for Internet Movie Database. It is an online database that provides information on television programmes, movies, OTT streaming content, video games and home games. The information includes the information of cast, crew, plot summary, ratings, trivia, biographies, critical reviews and fans. It was originally a fan-operated website, but now is owned and maintained by imdb.com, Inc., a subsidiary of Amazon. As per the data of December 2020, Internet Movie Database (IMDb long form) has 83 million registered users, 7.5 million (approx) titles (including episodes) and 10.4 million personalities in its database. Internet Movie Database (full form of IMDb) started as a movie database on the Usenet group "rec.arts.movies" in 1990 and moved to the web in 1993. 

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IMDb Details

IMDb History

IMDb originated with a Usenet posting, which was entitled "Those Eyes", by a British film fan and computer programmer, Col Needham. It was about an actress with beautiful eyes. Soon, it started growing in popularity and people with similar interests started adding their own lists. Col Needham added an “Actors List”, Dave Knight started “Directors List”, and Andy Krieg took over “The List” from Hank Driskill, which was later renamed as “Actress List”. Initially, they added names in the lists who were alive and working, but soon they started adding retired people too. So, Needham started a separate “Dead artist” list, but later it was removed. By the late 1990s, the list included 10,000 names and on October 17, 1990, Needham developed and posted a collection of  Unix shell scripts. It was the database that developed to take the shape of IMDb today and was then called as "rec.arts.movies movie database". 

After going through a lot of changes, finally, in the year 1993, it moved onto the fledgling World Wide Web under the name of Cardiff Internet Movie Database. The database was formed on the servers of Cardiff University in Wales. Rob Hartill was the original web interface author. In the year 1996, the database was incorporated in the UK and it became the Internet Movie Database (IMDb full form). Col Needham was the primary owner. In 1998, Jeff Bezos, the owner, founder and CEO of Amazon, signed a deal with IMDb and the IMDb became the subsidiary of Amazon.com. 

IMDb Content

Data Provided by the Subjects - The actors and crew can add their details and add their photos by paying a yearly subscription. This started in 2006 and in 2012, this feature was added in IMDb Pro (Paid membership of IMDb).

Copyright, Vandalism and Error Issues- Individuals who contribute to IMDb content have their own copyright but IMDb has the copyright for the compilation of the contents. IMDb has full rights to copy, modify and sublicense the content. The content or data submitted to IMDb goes through various process of consistency checks before it goes live on the website. Any errors or false information if found are fixed as soon as possible. While IMDb plain text files are processed, The Java Movie Database (JMDb) creates an IMDb_Error.log file that lists all the errors. 

Data Format and Access - IMDb does not have an API for automated queries. However, the data can be downloaded as compressed text files. The data downloaded can be extracted using command-line interface tools.

Film Titles - The titles available on the IMDb website are in English as well as translated versions in various languages. 

IMDb User Ratings

IMDb has a rating scale from 1 to 10 to rate the movies, television programmes and web series’ etc. The ratings given by the users are filtered in various ways and a weighted mean is displayed for each movie, web series etc. 

IMDb Rankings

IMDb publishes a list of top 250 movies on their website based on the rankings. As of 28th May 2021, the top-ranked movie was The Shawshank Redemption (1994) with a rating of 9.2.  The Godfather (1972) is on number 2 with a rating of 9.1 and The Godfather: Part II (1974) is on number 3 with a rating of 9.0. The top 5 Indian movies with a rating of 8.5 are Pather Panchali (1955),  Nayakan (1987), Anbe Sivam (2003), Pariyerum Perumal (2018) and  Hanky Panky (1979). 

The top 250 list is prepared based on the votes of “regular voters”. However, the criteria are not disclosed by the IMDb of these “regular voters”. 

Just like the top 250, IMDb also has a bottom 100 list based on the ratings.  Disaster Movie (2008) is the lowest-rated movie with a rating of 2.0. 

IMDb Statistics