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History

The Beginning

The Lockstockmods.net era (Summer 2010 – )

Fanart.tv had its humble beginnings as an after thought tacked onto another site called lockstockmods. Back in those days, it sat at the rather misleading address of lockstockmods.net/clearart/, and it was exclusively for clearlogos. (I didn’t know what the difference was when I created the site.)

After talking to the ClearLOGO pimps of that age (mostly mcborzu, hikaricore, Sranshaft, MarkAsRead and ppic) I convinced them to ditch their antiquated methods of managing ClearLOGOs and hitch their cart to my horse.

When we started, there were around 900 images, but my site allowed people to make requests, and boy did they take that to heart. At one point in time there were over 500 requests! That was a pain at the time, (the queue ultimately had to be purged) but fast forward 18 months and it certainly paid off, as we have around 5,500 images as of December 2011.

ppic adding support for the new repository was also a major factor in the subsequent success of fanart.tv. Without his support fanart.tv might not be where it is today, since his logo downloader script was what originally got almost all XBMC skinners interested in integrating the images into their skins.

A month or two after starting, imaginos, the owner of xbmcstuff, and I talked about creating a collaborative website for the different kinds of artwork that both sites offered, but different time zones and schedules made that a difficult job. Even though it did not end up working out, this was the seed of change that fanart.tv was to spring from.

October 2010, the API was getting around 130,000 hits a month, and in November 2010, I started talking about putting the ClearLOGOs on their own domain, and there was talk about joining forces with xbmcstuff again, but imaginos had been MIA for several months with no contact with anyone.

The New Era

December 2010 I bought the fanart.tv domain. At the time, people were worried that everyone’s hard work would be lost when the xbmcstuff domain expired, so I was asked to import all the images onto fanart.tv. I agreed to do that, with the exception of cdArt, but made it clear that imaginos was free to join the project in any capacity he wanted; as far as I was concerned it would be as much his site as mine if that was what he wanted.

December 10, 2010 at 23:11, I informed the XBMC community that the new site, fanart.tv, had gone live!

August 20, 2011 CharacterArt was added as a new TV subsection.

    • TV Show CharacterArts are images of a tvshow characters or recognizable object of the tv show with a transparent background
    • Can be used while browsing your media centre library to show next to the poster/banner or as a recognisable navigation item

October 23, 2011 A Youtube channel was made for uploading video tutorials of how to make ClearLogos, ClearArt, cdArt and so on.

December 6, 2011 A sneak preview was made available for devs and moderator to see how the new site was going to look. A lot of work still had to be done before it could be used by the general public.

December 10, 2011 The one year celebration of fanart.tv

March 17, 2012 The new site went live which meant a big step in the life of fanart.tv. Alot of improvements have been made compared to the ‘old’ site. It has a whole fresh new look, easier to navigate and it will be a lot easier to add new subsection should these be required.

March 27, 2012 The site moved to his new dedicated server. Due to increasing traffic of the site and API the old shared server was having a lot of problems keeping up and overloaded on a regular basis. This forced us to move to a search for a more powerfull dedicated server to make sure the site kept running smooth.

April 23, 2012 fanart.tv now has more than 40.000 images to be use XBMC, OpenELEC, trakt.tv, YAMJ and many other mediaplayers. Also media managed use these these to bring it to the next level.

May 12, 2011 Artist Thumbs subsection was added to Music.

    • Artist thumbs are high quality thumbnail images of an artist or band
    • Can be used while browsing your media centre library to show Thumbnails of all your artists/bands

May 29, 2012 Backgrounds subsection were added for Movie and TV after some requests for way to house higher quality controlled images than were already available.

June 4, 2012 Record labels section was added. This will house all the different record labels that are avaiable in the world. MusicBrainz will be used a the main list from which we derive our list. This was choosen since all other music sections also use MusicBrainz.

June 14, 2012 Image population reached 50,000. Two months ago this was only at 40,000.

Jun 21, 2012 fanart.tv held his first contest. Prizes were donated by the great people of Pulse-Eight and MetaBrowser.

July 30, 2012 Image population reached 60,000. Less then 7 weeks ago this was only at 50,000.

July 30, 2012 Image population reached 60,000. Less then 7 weeks ago this was only at 50,000.

October 21, 2012 Image population reached 80,000.

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