We’re switching to TMDB as the primary data source for TV shows
After several months of internal discussion, we are announcing our plans to use TMDB as the primary data source for all TV shows. The quality and completeness of data has greatly improved at TMDB over the years and we think with some re-alignment of community resources, it can work really well as Trakt’s primary TV data source.
Why are you switching to TMDB?
What it really boils down to is a moral opposition to taking in data from a community and then trying to sell it back to them. We believe when a user contributes to an online data source, they mean for that work to be shared with everyone around them. Both TMDB and Trakt have open and free APIs for developers to build upon that hard work.
TVDB is enforcing a commercial paid model to get access to their community moderated data. The first option is a commercial agreement with an app directly, but we’ve heard TVDB is asking for unrealistic licensing fees compared to an app’s revenue. The second option is charging users directly to access TVDB data. That doesn’t really work either, since that means an app is dependent on users paying a 3rd party service to work.