The Best Alternative to IMDb Is… The Movie Database
TMDb is an initialism that is almost similar to its more bigger counterpart: IMDb. Both are massive indexes for movie and television information, but The Movie Database differs from the Internet Movie Database in one key aspect:
TMDb is completely powered by its community.
IMDb is owned and operated by the behemoth called Amazon, which isn’t a massive point against the site. But having a viable alternative to Amazon is always handy and worth keeping in mind.
What’s So Good About TMDb?
The Movie Database is an online crowdsourced database for movie and television information. The metadata on movies and TV shows is contributed by the 1.1 million strong community. As of writing this, the site has indexed 393,000+ movies and 73,000+ TV shows across 39 languages.
Several other features make it a strong alternative to IMDb for movie information.
- Discussion boards. IMDb shut down its discussion boards in 2017 thanks to trolls. TMDb has clean well-moderated discussion boards you can access from each movie page.
- Media centers powered by TMDb. The Movie Database is used by media players like Kodi, MythTV, and Plex to showcase movie metadata, posters, and fan art.
- Free third-party apps that use TMDb. Take a look at the Apps page on TMDb which lists clients for iOS, Android, and all other platforms that tap into the database’s API. Cinematics: The Movie Guide is one of the best free reference apps for movies.
- Photos and Posters. TMDb boasts one of the largest collections of movie posters, photos, and fan art on the web. The latest count of this collection is approaching almost 2 million.
- No ads. The site is clean and does not support ads. The API is also very fast that makes it a prime choice for media centers like Kodi.
No one can deny that IMDb is huge. It had a headstart after all and is now powered by Amazon. But, TMDb is also right here if you like talking about movies and an alternate glance at movie ratings powered by the community.
