Amazon's IMDb.com: Can it be a web video powerhouse?

Amazon's movie trivia and information website IMDb.com is trumpeting its ambitions. IMDb founder Col Needham, speaking at the South by Southwest film festival, said the site aims to provide free streaming of its entire database of movies and TV shows. That's a tall order, given that IMDb's rapidly growing index now totals 1.3 million movies.

Will IMDb become a major video streaming player in the mold of Hulu and Netflix? And what are Amazon's ultimate plans for the movie trivia site? Amazon is clearly putting some new effort into its Video on Demand service, and IMDb is poised to play a significant role in that.

IMDb has become a go-to source for movie and TV info, with cast lists, photographs, reviews, and more. IMDB further bulked up its content last year, acquiring Box Office Mojo, a site that tracks movie grosses, and Without A Box, an indie film promotion site. Needham said IMDb traffic is up to 57 million unique visitors per month.

IMDb started streaming video last fall, and signaled then that it wanted to make all movies and TV shows available for free. But the site still has an uphill climb to achieve that goal. Needham said IMDb today can stream a modest 14,000 TV episodes and a "couple of thousand" movies, along with 120,000 other pieces of video, including movie trailers, interviews and featurettes, Cnet reports.

Amazon is clearly looking to expand the reach of IMDb, based on some of the company's recent job postings. It will also be interesting to see if IMDb, which has a German language site, rolls out more international versions.

About Eric Engleman

ERIC ENGLEMAN is senior technology staff writer for TechFlash and the Puget Sound Business Journal, covering online retail giant Amazon.com. Engleman tracks Amazon's increasingly complex business, spanning ecommerce, Kindle, cloud computing, and more. He's been covering technology and other industries for the Business Journal since 2003.

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