The Movie Database Support
Support → API Support
Trying to find average runtime of a show
posted by dtaggartSTAFFMOD on June 18, 2025 at 2:15 AM
Older define series had EpisodeRunTime filled in with a list of ints. I understand that now the episode duration is stored on the episodes but to find the average I would now need to request every single episode get the run time then average them?
Is there a better way? I much prefer the original implementation or if there was a endpoint I can get a subset of data of all episodes with flags on the fields I am interested in.
Reply by superboy97
on June 18, 2025 at 4:20 AM
The old system doesn't permit to correctly calculate an average.
For example, it was saying that there are episodes that last 50 minutes and other that last 75 minutes, but not how many episodes there was for each value.
Reply by Travis Bell
on June 18, 2025 at 3:31 PM
Hi @dtaggart,
We've never had a field for the average runtime of a TV show. I did however create a new ticket for us to look at this here.
Reply by dtaggart
on June 18, 2025 at 5:02 PM
Ok sure but I am asking if there is a way that to do it now. I get the old way is no longer supported even if it was wrong. What is the correct way to do this is the question.
Right but you use to provide episode lengths at the series information level that I was able to calculate it myself @superboy97 said it wasn't always "correct" but its better then needing to make 200 request for each episode in the episode api on larger shows.
Reply by Ruby
on June 20, 2025 at 6:06 AM
While on the topic of runtimes for TV shows, I wonder if it's possible to rename the field "Runtime" to "Average episode runtime" (the field I'm referring to can be seen here, for example).
The reason for this is that users often misinterpret this field as the total runtime of a TV series, because there's no indication to suggest otherwise. For film entries, this field relates to the total runtime.
The result is that services that use TMDb's API then experience issues with imported data for TV shows: the "runtime" gets multiplied by the number of episodes, resulting in wild numbers.
If the field could be renamed to be more descriptive about the expected input, it would very much help contributors as well as users of TMDb data. Thank you!
Reply by superboy97
on June 20, 2025 at 6:10 AM
This field should only be used for the duration of one single episode if all the episodes have the same duration. Otherwise, it should be locked empty.
It should not contain the average episode runtime, nor the total serie runtime.
Reply by Ruby
on June 20, 2025 at 6:17 AM
Thanks @superboy97 - in that case, even more, the function/expected input should be specified by the field's name.