IMDb's vision: Offer streaming for every title
IMDb founder Col Needham said the massively popular movie database has set as its major goal for the future to add one-button streaming for all of the 1.3 million titles it indexes. Obviously, the vision is a long-term one, Needham acknowledged, and it faces hurdles from the slew of content owners who control the vast library of titles the Internet Movie Database provides information about, but as a leading movie-oriented site, it's a very important goal to articulate in public.
Needham was speaking Monday afternoon at the South by Southwest (SXSW) Film Festival here. Oddly, though his talk was part of the film festival, the room was packed almost entirely by attendees of the associated SXSW Interactive Festival.
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.
