Rest in peace, neglected iTunes Movie Trailer app and website
arstechnica.comI remember the days of real player and desperately going to trailers.apple.com to get trailers that weren't blurry, artifact-filled garbage. It was a daily stop for me for a long time.
I think the Phantom Menace teaser was when I first downloaded Quicktime Player…
This was my first thought too.
I suspect lucky timing that a significant enough sequel came out with huge interest close enough to the trailer site being available drove people to it.
It was the first time I remember people going to see a movie specifically to watch the trailer more than the whatever movie it was that had the trailer. Then the first time people could actually watch trailers at will. Rental VHS/DVD had trailers but always a gamble which you’d get, and they had to be returned. For the first time you could download and rewatch it over and over.
Even with a lot of very hardcore WindowsForLife friends they all went to get QuickTime to watch the trailer.
When they advertised QT3 and its new wonderful codec "Sorenson"? :)
Way back when Sorenson came out, there was a software transcoding package that I just cannot remember the name. It was commercial and available for Mac and PC. It wasn't Squeeze. They sold a Mac version and a PC version separately. We had both platforms at the time, but only the budget for one. We settled on the Mac version. Funny thing, the CD installer was a dual format. On the Mac, it would show the Mac software, but when placed in the PC, it would show the PC software. So one purchase, both versions. It wasn't sold/advertised this way. They meant for you to buy a copy per OS. Can't help they were dumb about it to save a few pennies.
“It was first launched as a sort of promotion for Apple's QuickTime architecture”
I remember seeing it have high quality video that started almost instantly. That just wasn’t a thing at the time.
Unrelated but does anyone remember QuickTime VR? I worked somewhere that had a copy of the software and it was amazing to make a 360 QuickTime file using a Sony Mavica on a tripod.
QTVR was the shit at the time. Was ahead of its time.
It’s too bad - the replacement experience is beyond inferior.
For a long time Apple trailers was my go to place because it lacked the exploding pop ups and advertisements of other trailer sites.
Ugh. What else is out there?