Nokia Trailers

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

~ the last words ~

The goodbye note recommended Xbox Video. "Dear friends, Nokia Trailers will close services on 31st of December 2014. You can try Xbox Video app which brings the latest movies and TV shows to your Windows Phone 8.1 and makes it easy to watch what you love wherever you are." That is the whole notice, printed under a heading that reads Thank You.

Nokia Trailers was a movie trailer app, exclusive to Nokia's Lumia phones. By 20 June 2012 the Windows device blog was describing it as released a few weeks earlier and already gaining popularity, which puts it in the spring of that year; the first archived capture of its site is 31 July. It ran on the Lumia 900 and the Lumia 800. One feature is the reason anybody remembers it at all: you could download a trailer and watch it later with no connection.

That sounds like nothing today. In 2012 it was a real convenience. Two minutes of video over a metered 3G plan was a decision you made deliberately, and an app that let you queue trailers on wifi and watch them on the bus was solving a problem the people who built it obviously had themselves.

~ the record ~

~ the plumbing ~

Archive Team's page on the shutdown is mostly a list of URLs, and the URLs give away who built the thing. The posters and the video files were never served from Nokia. They came from solutions.futurice.info and then from an Amazon S3 bucket named xa-cdn-production, which puts Futurice, the Finnish software consultancy, behind the app. There was also a staging site at staging.nokiatrailers.com that linked straight to the video files where the main site wrapped them in JWPlayer, and it was left reachable from the open internet.

Trailer pages used eleven-character identifiers in the YouTube style, which is what made the thing crawlable at all. ArchiveBot pulled 8.4 gigabytes out of it on 1 January 2015, the day after the service closed. The captured page still carries a 2012 Nokia copyright line at the foot.

~ the handover ~

Microsoft completed its purchase of Nokia's devices business on 25 April 2014, and what followed was a long year of renaming and switching off. The Nokia Collection in the store became the Lumia Collection, and Nokia Xpress was retired a few months after Trailers. The replacement the trailer app pointed its users at was a Microsoft service, not a Nokia one.

Archive Team recorded the site as shut down on 2 January 2015, two days past the stated date. The notice was still being served on New Year's Day, which is how ArchiveBot got anything at all: the service had stopped on schedule and the front door was left propped open for another forty-eight hours.

~ the phone i actually had ~

Nokia was the phone company in Turkey. Everybody I knew had a Nokia before they had anything else, and the repair shops still had parts for models that were five years dead. Lumia was a different story here. Windows Phone never got traction, the carriers pushed Android hard from 2011 on, and the handful of people I knew with a Lumia had ended up with one on a contract deal. So I had the brand loyalty this app was built on top of, without owning the handset it ran on.

The offline download I understand completely, though. I started on a 33.6k modem in 1998 and spent years after that on a TTNet line with a cap on it, and the instinct to grab a file while the bandwidth was there and look at it later has never really left.

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