The story
Founded by Col Needham on Oct 17, 1990.1
IMDb began as a fan-operated movie database on the Usenet group "rec.arts.movies" in 1990, and moved to the World Wide Web (www. system) in 1993.
Pre-website
IMDb originated from a personal film database that English film enthusiast Col Needham had maintained as a hobby since 1987. Needham, who worked as an engineer at Hewlett-Packard in Bristol, had been recording details of every film he watched since his teenage years.
In the late 1980s, Needham joined the Usenet newsgroup rec.arts.movies, where film enthusiasts exchanged information about movies. He made a posting entitled "Those Eyes" about actresses with beautiful eyes, which prompted other users to respond with additions and their own lists. Needham subsequently started an "Actors List", while Dave Knight began a "Directors List", and Andy Krieg took over "THE LIST" (which would later be renamed the "Actress List") from Hank Driskill. Both the actors and actresses lists were initially restricted to people who were alive and working, but as the project grew, retired performers were added, leading Needham to create a separate "Dead Actors/Actresses List". Steve Hammond later started collecting and merging character names for both the actors and actresses lists; when these achieved popularity, they were merged back into the main lists.
By late 1990, the lists included almost 10,000 films and television series, correlated with actors and actresses appearing therein. On October 17, 1990, Needham developed and posted a collection of Unix shell scripts to the newsgroup that could be used to search the four lists, and thus the database that would become IMDb was born. At the time, it was known as the "rec.arts.movies movie database".
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. The database continued to be maintained by volunteer "section managers" who received contributions from users around the world.
On the Web
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, on August 5, 1993, it moved onto the fledgling 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 Wales. Rob Hartill was the original web interface author. In 1994, the email interface was revised to accept the submission of all information, which enabled people to email the specific list maintainer with their updates. However, the structure remained so 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. 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 1996, IMDb was incorporated in the United Kingdom, becoming the Internet Movie Database Ltd. Founder Col Needham became the primary owner. General revenue for site operations was generated through advertising, licensing and partnerships.
As Amazon.com subsidiary (1998–present)
In April 1998, Jeff Bezos, founder, owner, and CEO of Amazon.com, struck a deal with Needham and other principal shareholders to buy IMDb outright; Amazon paid $55 million for IMDb and two other companies. Bezos attached it to Amazon as a subsidiary, private company. This gave IMDb the ability to pay the shareholders salaries for their work. In the process of expanding its product line, Amazon.com intended to use IMDb as an advertising resource for selling DVDs and videotapes.
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From 1996 onwards, an annual newsletter email (archived on the website) has been sent from Col Needham to contributors on the first day of each calendar year. The annual newsletter lists various information about the past year on the site, including stats, top contributors tally for the year (the top 300 users, currently; fewer in previous years), and a perspective on the site's progress and future.
As an additional incentive for users, as of 2003, users identified as one of the "top 100 contributors" of hard data received complimentary free access to IMDbPro for the following calendar year; for 2006 this was increased to the top 150 contributors, and for 2010 to the top 250.
In 2008, IMDb launched their first official foreign-language version with IMDb.de, in German. Also in 2008, IMDb acquired two other companies: Withoutabox and Box Office Mojo.
The website was originally Perl-based, but IMDb no longer discloses what software it uses for reasons of security, apart from mentioning The Apache Software Foundation. In 2010, the site was filtered in China.
In 2016, The IMDb Studio at Sundance was launched, a talk show that is presented on IMDb and YouTube.
The site's message boards were disabled in February 2017. In April 2017, IMDb celebrated its 25th anniversary. As of that year, Needham was still managing IMDb from its main office in Bristol in the Castlemead office tower.
In January 2019, IMDb launched an ad-supported streaming service called Freedive. This was the company's second attempt at a streaming service; it launched a similar service in 2008. In June 2019, Freedive was rebranded as IMDb TV. In April 2022, the service was rebranded again as Amazon Freevee. On December 30, 2024, it was closed as an independent site and its content was merged into Amazon Prime Video.
From Wikipedia’s article on IMDb, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.4