So Long, Apple Trailers, and thanks for all the fish

Well, they finally pulled the plug on iTunes Movie Trailers. Starting life as a website to showcase the then-new Quicktime video format, it evolved into an iOS ecosystem app, and quietly spent two decades as the best way to see trailers for new movies. It made it a long time; my first memory of it was using the original web version to slowly load the first teaser for Episode I over dialup.

I’ve seen some speculation that this was all part of a rebranding exercise to redirect traffic to the Apple TV app (not to be confused with the Apple TV streaming service, or the Apple TV hardware product,) I suspect it’s more likely that whomever had been keeping it running since the late 90s had finally retired? Or maybe it really just didn’t fit in with Apple’s expanding streaming/services future.

So a moment, then, to note the passing of a small, single-purpose service that did one thing, and did it perfectly. Becase that’s all it did—had a library of trailers for upcoming and recent movies. Search, sort, organize by release date. High quality video, no muss, no fuss, no other advertising glop. It was remarkably up to date, had a trailer for basically every new movie, and frequently had any other EPK-type promo video as well.

It was a constant on my Apple TV (the hardware). “Hey’ let’s see if there’s any new trailers!” was a common request in the house. It was fun, it was simple, we liked it. So yeah, they shut it down. Two months or so past the shutdown, it’s left a surprisingly big hole! What are the alternatives we’re left with?

It goes without saying that the Trailers section of the Apple TV app, like all other sections of that app, is unmitigated hot garbage. Not only is it hard to find, but it doesn’t even have all the trailers from the old app! Bad sorting, no release dates, and it doesn’t seem to be nearly as complete or updated near as often.

YouTube seems to be the standard answer, but that’s also such a step back. Sure, all the trailers are there, somewhere. But, search on the Apple TV’s (the hardware) Youtube app is terrible, and every trailer has dozens of crappy copies, re-uploaded with somebody else’s watermarks, or other ads tacked on the front, or some guy “reacting” to it, or worst of all, it’s not the real thing at all, just some fan edit. And sure, that’s YouTube, but that’s not what I’m looking for. I just want the damn trailer. YouTube’s biggest problem is the amount of noise to signal; which is great if you’re looking for the noise, but sometimes you want to go watch the actual signal, you know?

And like so many things from the early web, we used to have a thing just for that which perfectly, but now it’s just gone, with no real replacement. The world doesn’t get smaller, but it sure keeps getting emptier.

Let me rephrase what I said up at the start: I hope they shut it down because someone retired. It would be beyond depressing if they killed off a perfect single-use (and probably cheap) service that we all liked that did one thing really well because it wasn’t making a 300% return on investment for some streaming sub-division.