IMDb creator foresees a revolution
IMDb creator Col Needham hopes to append a "play" button to every page on his web site, making films available instantaneously.
By A.J. Fox, The Dartmouth Senior Staff
Published on Monday, March 30, 2009
Last week at "South by Southwest," a hipster-chic arts festival in Austin, Texas, a man with the incongruously unassertive name of Col Needham stood before an audience and cheerfully prophesized the end of movie-watching as we know it. Needham, the founder of the Internet Movie Database, announced that his web site -- an immensely popular index of film and television data, generally acknowledged as the most comprehensive of its kind -- is in the early stages of a project to outfit each of its countless movie profiles with streaming videos of actual films. If this endeavor succeeds, every single movie listed on IMDb will someday be available to watch online, legally and instantaneously. As Needham succinctly put it in a quotation that grabbed the attention of cinematically-inclined bloggers the world over, "We want to have a play button on every single page."
Even the most casual movie fan would be wrong to regard this statement as anything less than tremendous. Within the film world, Needham's prediction is roughly comparable to President John F. Kennedy's declaration in 1961 that the United States would land a man on the moon in 10 years; bold, gutsy, based more on ambition than hard facts, but still staggering in its implications. Imagine the most comprehensive movie site on the web, whose list of titles dwarfs the knowledge of even the most devout movie buff, someday offering every single film in its catalog for instant public consumption. Everything from Kate Hudson's latest rom-com to black-and-white Slovenian dramas from 1962, viewable at the click of a button.
In 2009, the concept of making feature-length films available for online streaming is no longer science fiction. Popular web sites such as Hulu, Netflix, and indeed IMDb itself, have already dabbled in this practice. Between them, these sites already offer a couple thousand titles that can be accessed on a whim. But if Needham's prophecy comes true, this paltry selection of movies is only the beginning. In the not-too-distant future, when bandwidth technology and copyright law have finally caught up with this new paradigm of consumption, we may find ourselves in a world in which cinema itself has become a primarily online phenomenon.
Of course, certain procedural hurdles must be acknowledged, some of them likely insurmountable. How, for example, will computer wizards manage to upload those countless (usually older) titles that have yet to enjoy the dignity of a digital transfer? Moreover, what can be done with those films whose legal ownership is in limbo, or whose creators do not wish to farm out their possessions? More likely than Needham's lofty vision of "a play button on every single page" is the still tantalizing possibility that a vast range of titles, both popular and obscure, will become available to a greater degree than ever before. Nor is this digital revolution likely to remain the province of IMDb alone; it doesn't take much to recognize that streaming web content is the way of the future, and no doubt a throng of silicon valley entrepreneurs are already lining up for a piece of the pie.
This glimpse into the future of cinema has already been previewed by similar advances in the music industry, in which media content -- formerly available only through physical purchase -- has shifted to the more convenient marketplace of the digital universe. This, in turn, has torn down the practical barriers between consumer and product, creating a startlingly unfettered relationship between music and its fans. Purchasing music has transformed into an act of impulse; just press play, and a galaxy of digital tunes is yours to enjoy.
If the same metamorphosis occurs in the movie business, the effect will be powerful and complicated and, in certain respects, not wholly positive. But it's still an exciting possibility to imagine, and if the film gurus at IMDb are right, it is one that we should get ready for.