Movies and TV Shows for free on IMDB.com

Amazon’s longtime property IMDB.com (which stands for Internet Movie Data Base) has announced that 6,000 movies and television shows are now available for free viewing on the site. Providers for the free content include Hulu, CBS, and Sony Pictures Television. There’s an article about the new offering at Wired.

I wandered over to IMDB and found the latest content listings available at http://www.imdb.com/features/video/. Categories include classic movies, classic TV shows, new TV shows, and independent shorts.

You’ll see available videos when you do a keyword search. For example, when I did a search for Iron Man I got a list of videos in my results — 16 trailers. And when I did a search for Saturday Night Live I got a whopping 633 results.

You don’t have to have an IMDB account to watch videos. Just click and start watching. There is an ad, but it’s not too annoying. And that’s why I’m listening to the “Samurai Hotel” sketch right now…

Amazon Launches Music Database Wiki Thing

Amazon has launched a new database for users to find and post information about music artists and acts. It’s called SoundUnwound and can be found at http://www.soundunwound.com/. There’s a ton of stuff here — the database incorporates information from other properties like Amazon’s own IMDB — and while users can contribute, the contributions will not be made public until reviewed by an Amazon staffer.

Many, but not all, of the albums on the site have track listings and MP3 samples available. So you can review the latest Amy Winehouse, but if you want to get samples from James Bookers’ Junco Partner album, you’re out of luck. You can get more details on the new offering at http://www.nwinnovation.com/story/0017170.html.

Here Comes the Kindle Competitor?

So the rumors about a new Kindle have been quashed by Amazon. But there is an 8×11″ e-book reader on the horizon. It’s just coming from a different company. TG Daily has a brief update about a new reader from Plastic Logic with plenty of good photos. You can catch it at http://www.tgdaily.com/html_tmp/content-view-39220-97.html. Wired.com has a few more details at http://blog.wired.com/gadgets/2008/09/plastic-logics.html and some more pictures.

Briefly: 8×11 view display, flexible plastic (Wired has a picture of the reader going all bendy), pop-up touch-sensitive keywords, Office documents read without fuss, no price announced as yet (bummer.)