Advanced Television

IMDb, TikTok collaboration

January 6, 2023

Movie, TV show, and celebrity information source IMDb and short-form mobile video destination TikTok are collaborating to help the TikTok community share and discover movie and TV content and information.

Powered by IMDb, TikTok has launched a new feature that allows users to link to movie and TV titles directly within the videos they create. The link directs people to a dedicated in-app page that showcases a collection of other videos that linked to the same title and highlights essential data about the movie or TV show, provided by IMDb, including top cast members, director, genre, release date, runtime, and user rating.

Users can also add movies and TV shows to the favourites tab of their profiles, allowing followers to access the titles’ information from IMDb. People can link up to five movies and/or TV show titles in a single video. At this time, the feature is available to users in the US and the United Kingdom.

“We’re excited to welcome TikTok as the latest major company to rely on IMDb data to power new experiences for their customers,” declared Nikki Santoro, chief operating officer of IMDb. “This innovative collaboration enables TikTok creators to showcase and share the movies and shows they love, further extending the IMDb mission to help customers discover and decide what to watch and listen to, wherever they are.”

“TikTok’s global community of movie and TV enthusiasts is incredibly active and passionate, with more than 25 billion combined views for the hashtags #FilmTok, #MovieTok, and #TVTok,” added Grace Li, director of strategic partnerships at TikTok and ByteDance. “As we continue to find new ways to enrich the TikTok experience, this new feature, developed in collaboration with IMDb, gives our community more opportunities to discover, create, and share the content they love.”

Before publishing a video on TikTok, users will see an option to ‘add link’. They can then search ‘movie and TV’ and look up any of the more than 12 million titles available on IMDb. Once they have selected their desired title(s), they can ‘add to video’ to return to the post page. Once they ‘post’ their video, the selected title(s) will be featured above the caption in the video. Clicking the displayed link will direct them to a page with more information about the linked title along with other videos that have tagged the same title.

TikTok’s licensing of IMDb data and information is fulfilled through AWS Data Exchange, a service designed to make it easy for millions of Amazon Web Services (AWS) customers to find, subscribe to, and use third-party data in the cloud securely.

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