Microsoft Cinemania

~ the obituary ~

cinemania was the movie cousin to encarta. our family pc had encarta. cinemania never showed up on our cd shelf the way encarta did, partly because american movie data was not the household reference our family needed in turkey, partly because IMDb was already starting to be a thing by the time i was old enough to look up a movie online. encarta i used. cinemania i mostly read about.

it shipped annually from 1992 to 1997 as part of the microsoft home line. each edition had thousands of movies on it, with reviews from leonard maltin and roger ebert licensed in, plus stills and short audio clips and a smaller set of full-motion video for headline films. cinemania 97, the last edition, even had a feature where the disc could pull new content over the internet from MSN. it was the most feature-loaded version. it was also the last.

microsoft did not formally announce a shutdown. they just did not make a cinemania 98. by then it was clear what had happened: IMDb had launched as a website in 1993 and over the next four years became free and comprehensive enough that anyone with a web browser checked it for movie information. you did not need to buy a CD for that.

~ the case file ~

~ what it was ~

cinemania belonged to a category that does not exist anymore: the reference CD-ROM. there was encarta for general knowledge and bookshelf for the english-reference shelf. cinemania was the movies one. streets and trips came later for maps. each was a $50-80 box you bought once a year if you wanted the current edition. the model worked when CD-ROM drives were the most exciting peripheral your PC had, and the web was a slow expensive trickle. by 1997 the web was free and the CD-ROM was the thing you used because the encyclopedia would not fit on a floppy.

~ what it became ~

nothing became cinemania. its content licensors moved on. roger ebert had his own website by the late 90s and leonard maltin had a print guide that kept selling. IMDb absorbed the comprehensive-database role and kept growing past it into the entire industry's de-facto credit registry. when microsoft killed the microsoft home brand entirely in the early 2000s, the whole CD-ROM reference category went with it. cinemania was just the first of that line to go.

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