IMDb plan to add streaming movies to website - By: Paddy Chang

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Popular movie trivia website IMDb is looking to add streaming content for the one million plus titles it has indexed on its website.
IMDB founder Col Needham has acknowledged that it wont be easy getting around the swath of content owners controlling its massive range of titles on the Internet Movie Database, but says that as a leading movie oriented website, it is a very important goal that it wants to achieve.
Needham was talking at the South by Southwest Film Festival. Talking about IMDb’s history from being founded prior to the advent of the internet, then its launch as a website and being bought by Amazon.com. He then 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 and difficult task.
IMDb has already started adding streaming video to its website, a task that started in September. There are so far around 14000 full length TV episodes and 2000 plus full length movies available on its website, as well as 120,000 other pieces of video content, such as interviews and movie trailers.
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.

When it comes to watching the latest TV shows online. Hulu has become the number 1 destination and already broadcasts content from over 130 TV networks. However the big glaring omissions are still ABC and CBS.

The reasons behind this are a little frail. For instance ABC say that they only distribute TV content to websites that accept its proprietary video player from Move Networks. Video sites such as Veoh and AOL do this. And CBS’s reason? Well noone knows, but they may be trying to compete with Hulu using its own newly aquired TV portal, TV.com, although the content on this site thus far is hardly getting anyones TV juices flowing.
ABC may not be broadcasting on Hulu but its happy to run advertising on the NBC/News Corp joint site. Broadcasting & Cable’s Alex Welprin noticed that ABC is running promo ads on Hulu shows for its sitcom “Better Off Ted,” including the option of watching a full trailer of the show, in exchange for getting “King of the Hill” commercial free.
Interestingly if a Hulu viewer does a search for any ABC TV show, such as “Desperate Houseweives,” Hulu links to ABC.com’s player anyway. Therefore ABC must be aware of how much traffic Hulu is sending its way and how many Hulu users are looking for ABC content on Hulu. As ABC obviously rate Hulu’s traffic big enough to advertise on it, surely the next logical step would be to distribute its TV shows directly through Hulu’s website.
If that were to happen. CBS would not surely be far behind.

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