iTunes Movie Trailers

» see trailers.apple.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

the first time i saw trailers.apple.com was around 2002 on a 33.6 modem in turkey, sitting through the download of a 480p quicktime file for some big summer release. that was how movie trailers worked on the web for a few years, you went to apple's site, picked the resolution your line could handle, watched a single trailer through the quicktime player you had installed for the purpose. honestly, the site was a free showcase that doubled as a quicktime-install funnel for apple.

this is mostly told from inside that era. the facts hold up clean. anyway, apple put up trailers.apple.com in '99 as part of the larger quicktime push. the deal with the studios was apple hosted high-resolution trailers in apple's video format on apple's bandwidth, the studios got a wide-reach distribution channel with better video quality than realplayer or windows media. through the early 2000s that was a real competitive edge, quicktime was the format that made trailers look good on a home pc.

roughly, the site held its position as the default trailer destination through the back half of the 2000s. close enough. youtube launched in '05 and started absorbing the movie-trailer traffic by '08 or so, the studios started uploading official trailers to their youtube channels in 720p and then 1080p. trailers.apple.com kept running with the apple-only video files and an interface that looked frozen in time, the trailer release calendar and the upcoming-movies grid the only real signal that anyone was still updating the site.

the iOS app shipped around '11 as a clean mobile face on the same content backend. i was not on iphone at the time, my phone was a nokia and then a samsung running android, the app was something i would only see at work on a colleague's screen. the app got sixteen minor updates over about eleven years, the kind of maintenance pattern that means nobody is championing it but nobody is killing it either.

~ the record ~

~ the long neglect ~

through the back half of the 2010s the site was visibly running on inertia. the upload schedule slowed, the interface never got the full-bleed treatment the rest of apple.com received, the calendar view kept the same grid layout from the snow leopard era. close enough. youtube was where the trailers actually got watched, apple's site was where film-twitter people occasionally went to feel something about the early web.

to be honest, the iOS app sat in the same shape, a clean little utility with a calendar of upcoming movies and a few official trailers per title. roughly, the version-history page reads like a maintenance log, bug fixes and ios compatibility updates, no feature work to speak of. the app store reviews through 2018 to 2022 are mostly polite complaints about missing trailers and broken calendar entries.

~ the day it died ~

this part i was not close to, the announcement was a website notice and an app update. on 31 august '23 the trailers.apple.com homepage went static with a redirect to the apple tv app, the iOS app pushed its seventeenth and final update which replaced the entire interface with a single screen saying the apple tv app was the new home of itunes movie trailers, a button below it to open the tv app. close enough. the standalone product was done.

the calendar grid is gone in the new home, the ability to browse upcoming trailers by date is gone (more or less). the apple tv app does carry trailers but they sit inside the broader movies-and-tv-shows surface, not in a dedicated trailer destination with its own grammar. the discontinuity is the death of the format, not just the brand.

~ the long tail ~

this is mostly told from outside, the artifact is the era when quicktime was a video-format competitor and apple ran the most-watched movie-trailer website on the open web. that era ended around 2010, the site outlived it by thirteen years on inertia and the brand-power of the trailers.apple.com url. the death in '23 closed the loop on the era, the site had been a quicktime artifact since the youtube era opened.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »