“I’ve always been a movie buff,” said Col Needham, Founder and Managing Director of IMDB.com.

Needham was interviewed Monday afternoon by IndieWIRE Co-Founder & Editor in Chief, Eugene Hernandez.
They discussed the history of IMDB, how it is managed and where it is going.

Being a film fan as long as he can recall, Needham said he saw Jaws as an eight year old and then was scared to go in the pool afterwards and also remembers seeing Star Wars when it first released and people had to sit in the aisles.

In 1979 he got a build it yourself computer and grew a paralel interest in technology. Then in the early ’80s acquired a VCR.
“I discovered the delights of being able to watch movies over and over and over again,” he said. “As a 14 year old I once watched Alien 14 times in a row.”

Needham confessed that IMDB began as a diary that lasted two weeks before it was a personal database.

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“In 1990 I saw roughly 1,100 films” not much if you’re a film reviewer, but he was “holding down the fort with a non-film job”.

Needham’s database became public in 1990 as a collaborative list with American college students of attractive actresses. Needham was irked with what was sort of a politically incorrect list, so he launched a complimentary actors list to balance it out and made it a monthly list.
He then launched a companion list of deceased actors and actresses to balance it out even more and by the end of the summer of 1990 some one asked for a list of directors, and it was added as well.

In the Fall of 1990, the group asked for a database so the lists could be searched.
“In true blue peter style… I was able to say ‘here’s one i made earlier’ and published the first version of IMDB,” he said.

A few weeks later someone else asked for writers, then composers, cinematographers, costume designers and so on till the end of 1990 they had 10,000 titles in the database.

“We now have 1.3 million titles in the database and I still don’t thing we’re half way there,” said Needham.

They launched the very first Website at Cardiff University in Wales in 1993 in collaboration with a graduate student.

In 1995 they found the traffic coming from Universities was doubling every two weeks along with the amounting data doubling every two weeks. This created a great amount of work and Needham and company began to wonder if “maybe one or two of us may be able to work on the site?” as a full time gig.
They decided to make a go of it and the first time Needham and the other originating directors were in the same room was when they signed the incorporation documents.

The first web version of IMDB launched right before the Oscars in 1996. Needham and co. purchased a computer and hosting on a credit card, then sold their first advertising two weeks later and paid off the credit card.

“We immediately spent all the rest of the money on buying a couple of servers,” he said and described that they were quite a different “beast” at the time being a profitable Internet company.

They sold their first movie advertising to Fox for Independence Day and Needham quit his day job shortly thereafter.

The site has gone through various changes since 1996. Needham explained that from the start “IMDB is a site built by passionate people who care about their subject matter.”
They now receive 600,000 items of data per week that a team of editors consider before publishing on the site.

“The trouble is when you accept all the genuine corrections and then discard all the bogus ones,” he said.

He said they are within a complete reformation of the data submission system. They are going toward a wizard type input.

Currently, Needham said that IMDB is moving toward inserting a “play” button on every single film and TV page to allow users to stream TV shows and films. They are starting with over 40,000 full length TV shows, a couple thousand full length movies and over 120,000 videos.