I am the developer of a free home theater application, called Chameleon Media Center (CMC), which emulates the look of Windows Media Center and provides a front-end to Binnerup's My Movies collection management. While My Movies currently provides 99% of the data that CMC displays, there are some data gaps. Most glaringly, the My Movies API does not expose any Actor or Crew data (particularly Biographies and Photos). I do have the full list of Actor/Crew per movie/TV show, including their role and character name, just not pictures or bio.

Would it be permissible for CMC to use TMDB's People media? If so, what is the best/preferred approach?

I was originally thinking of caching the data on my server (in order to minimize any impact to TMDB service), but from reading the Terms of Use, I believe this would NOT be acceptable.

Alternatively, if each user downloaded all of the actor/crew data for their entire collection, I think this too would violate the Terms of Use. For example, in my own collection I have over 2000 movies, and about 100,000 actors plus tens-of-thousands more crew. If I downloaded 100k to 150k records just for myself, I imagine that would be bad enough, much worse if every CMC user was doing the same thing individually. And since caching is not permitted beyond 6 months, I'm guessing this means this approach is even worse since the data would need to be fully refreshed at least twice a year. I'm fairly certain this wouldn't be permitted.

So, I've been trying to determine how to stay in compliance with TMDB's Terms of Use, and I'm thinking the only viable solution would be for CMC to download a single person, on-demand, as a user navigates to that person and wants to retrieve the bios and photos. That would likely be a very small load for TMDB. The CMC user base is tiny, and they would only be browsing this data occasionally. This is probably TMDB's intended type of use.

That does leave a small functionality gap, though. In CMC, when you select a movie and browse to the Actor/Crew page, it would be ideal to show photos next to each person even if they don't select a person to retrieve the Bio. That could mean several hundred photos would be retrieved, on-demand, for each and every movie. If I quickly browsed through a dozen movies, and looked at the cast/crew page, then that might result in several thousand photos being retrieved. Would this be acceptable use?

I appreciate any guidance you can provide.

Thanks, Paul