IMDB gets streaming, full-length movies — at last

The venerable movie site had just about everything else under its belt, including exhaustive lists of credits, oodles of trivial, trailers, plot synopses, you name it—just no actual movies. Until now, that is.

In what can only be described as the ultimate no-brainer, Amazon-owned IMDB has added embedded, full-length movies and TV shows for about 6,000 titles listen on the site. The videos come courtesy of Hulu and CBS, and they're free—although you'll have to sit through plenty of non-skippable ads. You'll also find links to Amazon Unbox (although no embedded videos, or at least not yet) if you want to rent or buy commercial-free versions.

IMDB has a page up listing some of the videos available, although if you're a Hulu and/or CBS.com regular, you can probably guess what's on tap. TV shows include "House," "CSI," "The Office," "Battlestar Galactica," "24," "Heroes," "Prison Break," "Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles," "Burn Notice," and "Without a Trace." For movies: Master and Commander, Bring it On, Fever Pitch, Liar Liar, Raising Arizona, The Scorpion King, Planet of the Apes (2001), and Hoop Dreams, among many others.

Overall, the implementation on the various IMDB pages is a bit clunky—just an embedded Hulu or CBS video, as you might find on any other site—but then again, IMDB has always been more about the content than the design. And of course, the 6,000 videos now playing on IMDB represents only a tiny fraction of the gazillion movies and TV shows listed on the massive site.

Still, it's a start—and now that Amazon lets you stream full-on, commercial free movies over Unbox, I don't see why IMDB couldn't eventually become the ultimate online rental store. And if Amazon added a monthly subscription service to its streaming rental library for unlimited IMDB movie viewing, well ... you'd probably never see me again.

Related:
Imdb.com allows free film, TV viewing [Reuters]