TL;DR 12 US$ per year for having access to TheTVDB API to scrape info for your TV shows and movies in the future. They might introduce an additional plan which lets you earn credits if you contribute data to the site.
Just a heads-up for fellow Kodi users. Although I like(d) the site and contributed a pic here and there, and some info on actors and such, I think this is the coffin nail for the endless problems with TheTVDB. Now’s your chance to familiarise yourself with creating .nfo files or look around for alternatives like TVmaze.
I think Kodi switched to TMDB as default scraper for shows back in February 2020 after problems heated up with another outage of TheTVDB that lasted a couple of days.
Not really a big fan of TMDB for shows. It’s great for movies, though, but its specialisation on movies and lack of shows really showed. Might be different now than from when I last tested. Right now, TVmaze looks like the best alternative to me besides local .nfo (and image files) which also have the advantage of only setting them up once and not having to care about a scraper when you rearrange your library every five years or so.
I have not tried TVmaze like he has but I have tried switching my TV shows over to TMDB several times and always ended up back just using TVDB. For most shows, and probably for most people they won’t notice much difference from one scraper to the next. However there is quite a few (mainly older) shows where there is disparities between how TVDB and TMDB lists episodes and specials. Some of this can be mitigated in TMDB with custom lists and parsing NFO’s but some of it can’t such as TV movies which TMDB does not allow to exist as specials on TV shows. Particularly for people who, like myself, have media created well over a decade ago that was named to match up with TVDB it can be a royal PITA to find and fix all the broken media.
