IMDb announces 100M-download milestone

IMDb’s TV-and-movies apps for iOS and Android have officially been downloaded more than 100 million times, placing the apps among the ranks of Facebook, Angry Birds, Instagram, and more.

When IMDb was founded in 1990 — long before Yahoo or Google — Col Needham, former programmer and current IMDb CEO, knew that people wanted quick access to all kinds of movie information. And, once his movie-loving users went mobile, he was eager to move these wants into their pockets. The first app was launched in December 2009.

This download surge comes on the eve of some incredible changes happening to the apps. The TV and movies apps are receiving huge upgrades with some awesome new features on Tuesday.

Needham is particularly excited about the new iOS “Times” feature that will be added within the Showtimes section that “makes it trivially easy to plan a movie outing and conveniently buy tickets based on the criteria that matter most to movie lovers.” You can download IMDb’s iOS app here.

This planning feature is based on a number of factors, such as when customers prefer a movie to begin or end, when customers want to leave to get to the movie theater, and the genre, MPAA rating, or IMDb user rating of the movie.

For the Android app, which you can download here, other new features include “Watch” icons, which allow customers to search for movies and TV shows that can be watched immediately and then find out where to watch them, and “Favorite Theaters,” which allow customers to view showtimes at their preferred theaters mentioned throughout the app.

As has been the case for the past year, getting tickets for the movies is available through a partnership with Fandango.

These aforementioned features are in addition to IMDb mobile features like “X-Ray,” which are skyrocketing in popularity for Kindle Fire and Wii-U. About X-Ray, Needham said to press in a recent interview, “If you’re watching on a device, and somebody walks into the scene and you wonder who they are, you simply tap the screen, and up pops the head shots of everyone in view.” With this feature, it’s incredibly easy to learn anything you want to know about an actor in seconds.

Boasting a combined mobile and web audience of over 190 million unique visitors per month, IMDb’s searchable database offers over 150 million data items, including over 5.5 million cast and crew members and over 2.7 million movies and TV programs. A subsidiary of Amazon.com, Inc., IMDb.com is the number-one movie site in the world.

For more than 24 years, IMDb has stood tall in the face of the emerging of hundreds of other movie and TV websites that could have taken it down. This 100 million-download milestone proves that it still holds the reigns as a one-stop shop for discovering entertainment information and news, the resumes of any actor, filmographies, biographies, film distributors, and more.