Well, we're not talking of GB of data here, or are we? Let me, see: I think about 1K movies are produced every year, halve that and multiply by 100, you get about 50K movies total. Let's double that to account for shorts, independents, etc. and we get 100K movies in the db. How much info is for one movie? The crew of Titanic from IMDb as text is around 85K. Let's say less than 256K per movie. So we're looking at about 13GB of data. With lossless compression, e.g. LZW and some austerity, say ~5GB.
That's not tiny, but not huge. And the amount of download bandwidth will not be much, due to long-tail effects. A company like Google or Amazon, who stand to benefit a lot from such a db can easily accommodate this.
Yeah, I meant one that wouldn't charge ~$15K for commercial access. One that would charge per db access would be nice.
But it's not exactly the money (after all fifteen grand, although excessive is not prohibitive) but the unreliability factor: if you're building a business on a db API there should be a warranty that the company won't decide to abandon it or cut your access unreasonably.
That's not tiny, but not huge. And the amount of download bandwidth will not be much, due to long-tail effects. A company like Google or Amazon, who stand to benefit a lot from such a db can easily accommodate this.