# TheTVDB TheTVDB is a community-edited database of TV series and movie metadata. Founded in 2006, owned by Whip Media since 2019. It currently tracks 173,000+ TV series, 359,000+ movies, and 7.6 million episodes. Why does this matter? Because your media files know almost nothing about themselves. A file called `S02E05.mkv` does not know its episode title, its air date, its synopsis, or which show it even belongs to. Something external has to supply all of that. That something is a metadata database, and TheTVDB is one of the most widely used ones. Media servers query it through the v4 API (source and docs at github.com/thetvdb/v4-api), which serves over a billion calls a day. The interesting part is the identifier. Once a show is matched, its TheTVDB ID is what keeps that match stable across file renames, re-scrapes, and reinstalls. The ID is the durable contract; the files are just cargo. The records come from 15,000+ volunteer editors, watched over by roughly 25 active moderators. Adult content is not allowed, which is why the catalog looks smaller than some competitors. ## Licensing, and the risk behind it The API is free if your project's parent company earns under $50k a year. Attribution with a direct link to TheTVDB is mandatory at that tier. Above it: $1,000/year up to $250k in revenue, $10,000/year up to $1M, custom terms beyond that. Free and open source projects get discounts. Keep in mind what that actually means. A large part of the self-hosted media stack runs on somebody else's database, on terms that can be revised at any time. Whip Media shut down TV Time, the sibling product that acquired TheTVDB in 2019, in July 2026. Nothing prevents the same decision on an API tier. If you depend on this, keep local NFO files or a second provider as a fallback. ## Related - [[Jellyfin]] (TheTVDB is an official plugin there, not a default provider; Jellyfin ships with TMDb, OMDb, and local NFO files) - [[Self-hosting]] ## References - https://thetvdb.com/ - https://thetvdb.com/about - https://thetvdb.com/api-information - https://github.com/thetvdb/v4-api