We spend a lot of time on our data over at IMVDb. Many hours a day are spent by us and our contributor team finding videos, verifying credits, and making sure IMVDb is as complete as possible. We also have thousands of contributions from users - things like a single credit or correction here and there, or an entire artist's or director's catalog.

Up until today, however, we've kept that data all to ourselves. So as we near two milestones for us - 20,000 videos and 60,000 credits, we're very excited to announce that we're making the data in IMVDb open to everyone via our first API.

If you're not familiar with an API, it is basically a way for developers to pull down data from a website and use it in an application. It means that any other website, iPhone/iPad app, or literally any other application of any kind can start integrating IMVDb data into their system. It's the first time IMVDb data has been available outside of viewing on imvdb.com.

Also, for developers reading - we've focused on making this API simple and fun to use. It's a modern, RESTful API designed for long-term growth. We've included lots of thorough documentation including a whole guide on how our data is structured, as well as an API sandbox and a changelog. We have a new twitter account at @imvdbdev and a new email address at developers@imvdb.com for support.

We started very simple with this API and focused on the core data - videos, entities (names), and searching. The reason for this is we wanted to release a strong foundation for when we start exposing more data to the API later on. We are currently calling this release a beta with the idea in mind that we may make some adjustments after developers get their hands on it and start using it.

If you're not a developer, this means that IMVDb's data could pop up anywhere, so it's more important than ever to make sure your projects and credits are in the database by submitting them. Look out for our brand new contributor guide and features coming early next week to help with that.

If you're a developer, we want you to use IMVDb's data in our app. Give the API a try, contact us directly and let us know what you think and what else you want to see.

We're excited to make the data that we've worked so hard to curate available to everyone, and we see this a big milestone for IMVDb. We're looking forward to see where IMVDb's data can be used!

Adam Fairholm is the co-founder and lead developer of IMVDb. You can find him on twitter at @adamfairholm.