My Movies to open up it's back-end system

I read this first on Ian Dixon's blog, that My Movies are set to open up their back-end system to other front-end movie plug-ins for Media Center. This is a good move in my opinion and can only lead to more greater looking movie collection user interfaces for Media Center.

My Movies Forum Post

We would like to invite other developers or companies to be able to base their front-ends on the My Movies back-end, which means that their users will be able to benefit from all My Movies' back-end features, such as:

- The "Collection Management" program, with advanced data editing capabilities.
- The "Online Collection" option, giving users the option to display their collection to friends.
- The "Folder Monitoring" option, that is able to automatically index titles stored on hard drives.

Special packages of My Movies will be made available to third parties interested in these options, where the My Movies front-end is no longer part of the package, and where configuration for My Movies front-end is not available. These packages will also be redistributeable, unlike the current My Movies packages.

The "Free of Charge Option"

The free of charge option is made available to all non-commercial products, or products based on volunteer donations and is based on the same terms that usage of My Movies is today. Users gain points by either contributing or donating to the My Movies project - these points then gives users access to additional features, or extends default enabled features - as always no features limiting the basic usage will require points. Using this option, My Movies pays for all traffic costs and maintenance costs the users gives, but at the same time benefits from the users contributions to our service.

The "Commercial Option"

The commercial option provides companies with commercial products the option to supply the My Movies back-end products as a company branded option, where users are not restricted by any limitations on contribution or donation points, and where the companies instead pay a small fee for each title the user adds to their collection.