Case Study: IMDb achieves ultrafast global search and scalable, cost-effective video delivery with Amazon Web Services

IMDb - Customer Case Study

IMDb, one of the world’s largest movie, TV and celebrity databases with over 100 million monthly visitors and millions of titles and people, needed instant, low‑latency search and scalable video delivery for a global mobile audience. The challenge was delivering search results and trailers quickly and reliably despite a massive theoretical search space and high mobile sensitivity to delay.

IMDb precomputes search-result documents, stores them in Amazon S3, and distributes them via Amazon CloudFront, reducing the practical index to about 150,000 documents and achieving sub‑100 ms international latencies. The solution delivers ultrafast, highly reliable search with no servers to maintain, significant cost savings (for example, 2.3M iPhone app requests in a day at an order‑of‑magnitude lower cost than server hosting), and secure, scalable trailer delivery to millions of users worldwide.

IMDb

Doug Treder

Senior software developer