IMDb Hopes to Stream All Titles One Day

IMDb founder Col Needham said the movie database has set a major goal for the future to add one-button streaming for all of its 1.3 million titles.

Needham says that the vision is long-term, mostly because of the hurdles the site will face from the content owners who control said titles.

He continued, saying that streaming may be difficult “because many of the films may not exist anymore and many may not be available for streaming.”

Fellow streaming websites such as Netflix, Hulu, Amazon and iTunes have their own arrangement with the content owners, so for IMDb to get access to the entire library would be a huge achievement.

So far, there are 14,000 full-length TV episodes, a couple of thousand full-length movies available on the site and 120,000 other pieces of video content (trailers, interviews, and featurettes).

Needham said that the site is adding thousands of new pieces of video content per week.

At that rate, however, it’s sure to take the site quite some time to achieve the goal. Needham continued to say that he “imagined a time three years from now when we will all look back at early 2009, when so many media sites are trying to solve the problem of making content available to those who want it in the face of resistance from the Recording Industry Association of America and Motion Picture Association of America, and we’ll shake our heads at where we were at. We’ll laugh at how little we knew about what business models would work.”

By Tessa Petrocco (Source: CNN)