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Television

Amazon Discussing Renaming IMDb TV To Help Draw More Viewers (theinformation.com) 36

First it was called Freedive, then it was dubbed IMDb TV. Now, less than three years after launching its free ad-supported video-streaming service, Amazon is looking to rename it, The Information reported Wednesday, citing people familiar with the situation. From a report: Amazon executives believe the existing name is too hard for people to pronounce, which hurts its popularity, said people familiar with the situation. Several alternatives have been tossed around in internal discussions, including Zon -- short for Amazon -- as well as Free TV and Free Streaming TV. The Zon idea was shot down but otherwise Amazon is yet to make a decision about the new name, the people said.
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Amazon Discussing Renaming IMDb TV To Help Draw More Viewers

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  • by Fly Swatter ( 30498 ) on Wednesday November 10, 2021 @03:46PM (#61976327) Homepage
    It turns out Amazon owns it...
    • by tgeek ( 941867 )
      And they have for 23 years now. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] )
      • by LostMyAccount ( 5587552 ) on Wednesday November 10, 2021 @05:05PM (#61976513)

        It really went into the toilet when they killed the IMDB forums. I don't know why they couldn't have just shaved that segment of the site off or at least given the entire forum database to whoever wanted to download it and start up a similar service. As a film/TV buff, the forums were awesome sources for information on film and TV, especially cult stuff and older content and talent. It worked because every entry in IMDB had its own forum.

          New movies/shows were kind of a train wreck of spam and trolling, but anything not recent usually was highly usable and the low traffic stuff (cult, older, etc) had amazing retention due to the low traffic. I would sometimes get replies to posts I had made 5+ years ago.

        There were some ad-hoc replacements, including some that seriously scraped the IMDB forums and have OG posts from IMDB forums themselves, but they all kind of suck in small ways and are too low traffic. Reddit is too chaotic and an entire subreddit is a bit too much overhead.

        Making all of this worse is that IMDB is like a bad version of People or Premiere magazine anymore, lots of flashy push of new garbage content.

        • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

          Forums used to be a good way to boost site engagement. They are old hat now though, mostly populated by older and less valuable demographics, who often use ad-blockers. The cost of running them just isn't worth it anymore.

          The money is in social media share buttons. A lot of traffic is from links on Facebook and the like.

          • I just didn't get what the "cost" was. There's 20 million entries in the database (slightly less, really, but its a good rough number).

            Most entries were obscure and had blank or a small number of posts. And they were all text, no graphics or heavy multi-byte data. If you assume 1 MB of forum data per title/talent entry, it's around 20 TB of storage. This is tiny by enterprise storage standards.

            And it's probably even off by maybe an order of magnitude, since a forum would need a lot of posts and replies

        • I agree that I miss the IMDB forums. They actually had useful information and interesting posts if you stayed away from "hot" forums and obvious troll posts.

          I can't remember now exactly what the event was, but I distinctly remember thinking when it happened that the removal of the forums was a direct reaction to an event about negative consequences from social media that happened a month or two before the forums disappeared. There certainly did seem to be an uptick in trolling and flame wars on them just

          • Yeah, it was a genius decision from a "we want to monetize this site to the hilt with ads and promotions from the industry".

            I never used the forums much for new films as it often was a train wreck, but even then OK for films which weren't summer blockbuster franchises that attracted the teen set.

            I suspect some of their problem may have been just old forum code lacking much moderation functionality and no low-cost way to bake it in without a major rewrite.

            I don't remember a specific incident per se, but do r

    • by fermion ( 181285 )
      Amazon bought it a long time ago and has in fact done damage to the original user created site. On the other hand, it is funding the bandwidth and keeping data up to date. I think that is a wash

      The specific issue with viewership, and this applies to all free ad supported streaming services, is content. The content owners are increasing starting their own paid streaming services and places content behind paywalls. Rather than using the traditional syndication model in which content is sold and supported b

    • by suss ( 158993 )

      The last layout change is more like it went into the toilet, clogged up the sewer, and came back up and flooded the entire house...

  • Here's an idea:
    Leave the name alone and market it as what it is instead of renaming it every few months to try and kill it off and direct people to your Prime content.

    Just a thought.

    • I don't think the name of the service is the (only) issue. Instead, it is the only issue that company managers are willing to discuss and deal with, after all, names are easy! On the other hand, the general consumer-unfriendliness of the service is much harder to deal with.

      My personal experience with IMDb TV, in dialogue format:

      Me: Hey that show looks interesting.
      Amazon: OK, you have to sign up and I'll show it to you. Give me your name, address, date of birth and e-mail address.
      Me: OK, here.
      Amazon:

  • by unixcorn ( 120825 ) on Wednesday November 10, 2021 @03:59PM (#61976387)

    In my opinion, it's not the name of the service, the problem with the IMDB channel is it has commercials. Even if I never ordered a package from Amazon and only watched their Prime video service, Prime cost is still very close to the cost of Netflix and there are a ton of movies and TV to watch for "free". Maybe I'm not seeing the big picture but why would I chose to watch commercials when fifteen bucks a month gets me a nearly unlimited selection.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Because you could repurpose that $15 as beer money if you watch IMDB instead.
  • It has resurrected the show Leverage and has other stuff of above average quality.

    But renaming it just makes you look like an idiotic failure. You get one free. Renaming it again will doom it.

    • by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

      Better yet, how about telling us why IMDb TV is better than Prime Video? You can get TV shows on both, so how am I supposed to know about IMDb TV? I just assumed it's all on Prime Video

      Maybe it's just because people who have Prime Video don't get told about it?

      • Comment removed based on user account deletion
        • If it is free, it is not an ad infestation, it is a reasonable way to make money.

          But when the shmucks charge you money and ALSO include ads, that is a disease that should be wiped out.

  • It would be self-descriptive of precisely what Amazon wants for their sprog.

  • eye em dee bee. tee vee.

    eye see.

  • by war4peace ( 1628283 ) on Wednesday November 10, 2021 @04:20PM (#61976461)

    TubeYou
    iMazon
    Meta... oh, wait.

  • Not only is there commercials, they took content from amazon prime (commercial-free) and moved it to IMDB with the commercials. Two shows that I had started watching and were commercial free (Andromeda and The Prisoner) changed to IMDB with the commercials. Really annoying.
  • Why not call it Free TV. This is a name easy to remember and people like stuff that is free. Or else call it Easy TV. Wow Already two names in just a few minutes. Another one for free: Wow TV.

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