IMDb's vision: Offer streaming for every title
Ostensibly, Needham was talking about the history of IMDb--from its founding even before the advent of the World Wide Web, to its launch as a dot-com site to its being bought by Amazon.com. But late in the talk, he explained how he wants to make it possible for the 57 million monthly unique visitors to the site to watch, with the click of one button, all the movies, TV shows, and other video content indexed on the site.It will be difficult to fulfill the vision, Needham said, "because many of the films may not exist anymore and many may not be available for streaming."But these days, free or paid streaming of movies is available from a number of sources, including: Netflix, Hulu, TV.com (a part of CBS Interactive, which publishes CNET News), Amazon, iTunes, and others. Each of those sources, though, has its own arrangement with the content owners, so for IMDb to get access to the entire library would be a massive undertaking.Still, rather than being a throw-away line that didn't carry any weight, Needham reiterated at the end of the talk that the vision was one of the company's major goals for 2009 and beyond.Already, IMDb has begun adding streaming content to the site, a program that began in September. Right now, Needham said, there are 14,000 full-length TV episodes and a couple of thousand full-length movies available on the site, as well as 120,000 other pieces of video content, many of which are movie trailers, interviews, and featurettes.And he 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 said 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," Needham said.
