Application

Application level authentication would generally be considered the default way of authenticating yourself on the API. Version 4 is controlled by using your v4 access token as a Bearer token. You can request an API key by logging in to your account on TMDB and clicking here.

Bearer Token

If you head into your account page, under the API settings section, you will see a new token listed called API Read Access Token. This token is expected to be sent along as an Authorization header. A simple cURL example using this method looks like the following:

curl --request GET \
     --url https://api.themoviedb.org/4/list/1 \
     --header 'Authorization: Bearer <<access_token>>'

Using the Bearer token has the added benefit of being a single authentication process that you can use across both the v3 and v4 API versions. Neither one of them provides any more or less access so which one you choose is completely up to you.

For GET based calls on v4, you can still use your v3 api_key query parameter if you want.