A deal was reached, and Amazon finally acquired IMDb in April 1998.īut even after becoming an Amazon subsidiary, IMDb retained its identity and considerable autonomy. Amazon in turn would link back to the movie database when users searched for movies on its site. IMDb could run as its own independent brand, linking back to movie DVDs sold at Amazon. Two years later, they were approached by Amazon’s Jeff Bezos who had an idea on how IMDb and Amazon could coexist. Needham and his team decided to use ads and tie-ups with movie studios to generate revenue, the first of which was one with 20th Century Fox for Roland Emmerich’s alien invasion movie Independence Day. And, together with three others, he finally incorporated IMDb in 1996, using his personal credit card to pay for expenses. But gradually he grew fond of the idea of running IMDb as a website. In its early days, Needham hadn’t thought about making money from what he described was his passion for movies. It was then known as the movie database. Needham decided to comply and thus, IMDb was born on Oct 17, 1990. With around 10’000 movies listed by the end of 1990, someone suggested he convert them into a database that can be accessed by anyone from all over the internet. Needham merged it into his own lists of movies and created two himself – one of actors and one of dead actors/actresses. Their discussions would drift towards actresses and one of the group members compiled a list of all actresses in Hollywood until then. He would maintain a diary of the films he watched including the film’s cast and crew details and, over the years, converted that into a local database stored in his own computer system.Īfter graduating from Leeds in 1988, Col Needham joined Usenet groups to find like-minded people to chat about movies. At one point, when he was 14 years old, he watched Ridley Scott’s Alien 14 times in 14 days. But the office of Col Needham, the founder and CEO, remains in Bristol, England, where the website was founded.Ĭol Needham was extremely passionate about movies. The amazing web platform and film encyclopaedia really was born at the dawn of the internet and is – in fact – older than the existence of web browsers.Īs a wholly owned subsidiary of (since 1998), IMDb is based in Seattle. IMDb, in full Internet Movie Database, is a website that provides information about millions of films and television programs as well as their cast and crew. So here is a little background to where IMDb came from and how it developed… Everything you could possibly want to know about any film ever made is on that database. I must admit, I’m using it more often than Google. And if you are a film buff like me then you haven’t been able to live without it for quite some years now. The Internet Movie Database, abbreviated IMDb, was founded mainly by Col Needham along with several others at the dawn of the world wide web.
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