The Movie Database (better known simply as TMDb) is a free and open sourced movie and TV show database. Created by Travis Bell in 2008, unlike other commercial databases, TMDb is entirely crowd sourced. While initially known only for movie data, TV content was added in 2013. History Originally started as a side project to help serve high resolution fan art to users of Kodi (formerly XBMC) by sharing zip files, as sharing files by this method became cumbersome to maintain, Bell created "themoviedb.org - A wiki-based open movie database" so that individual users could add and contribute content on their own. The website has since gained further use by being one of the main suppliers of data to a number of other services, including Plex, Letterboxd, et al. Data Since 2008, all data and images have been user contributed, with the site normally processing over 12,000 edits a day, and these contributions being moderated by a group of volunteer content moderators. , the site contains around 300,000 movies, and continues to grow over time. Comparisons Unlike the similar commercial website IMDb (owned by Amazon.com), who charge large annual fees for customers to use their data, TMDb's open nature, means many movie and TV sites can access and use it's data, including individual users of media management software such as Plex, Kodi, and others. TMDb gained large interest when in late February 2017, the IMDb gave around two weeks notice of the complete removal of the message boards functionality from their site, including all the historical postings data. Following the fallout, large numbers of their message board users found TMDb, as chief programmer Bell immediately expanded upon the previously basic incorporated message board functionality for each object on the site (movie, TV series/episode, company, person) to quickly help users continue conversing about movie and TV related subjects.
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