Friday, September 1, 2023

Apple Discontinues iTunes Movie Trailers App

Joe Rossignol:

Apple today updated its iTunes Movie Trailers app for the iPhone with a notice that the Apple TV app is the new home of movie and TV show trailers. It is no longer possible to use the iTunes Movie Trailers app, which launched in 2011.

[…]

The accompanying iTunes Movie Trailers website is also no longer available following the transition to the Apple TV app, which began earlier this month.

In the Apple TV app, there is now a “Watch the Latest Trailers” section in the Store tab, although it might not be visible in all countries.

Apple was once the best source for finding high-quality and fast-loading versions of the latest trailers. Now, I dread opening the TV app. It’s difficult to navigate and search. I just scrolled through everything but could not find the trailers section. However, a Google search quickly turned up trailers.apple.com, which opens the proper section of the app. Normally, though, I just use IMDB (easier to browse) or YouTube (can save offline).

Nick Heer:

Apple killed off its movie trailers site without replacing it in Canada. Left, a bunch of trailers shown in the U.S. version; right, basically nothing in the Canadian version.

Still no way to access trailers in the TV app in Canada.

Nick Heer:

My eyes hurt. Does anybody at the world’s most valuable publicly-traded corporation with a reputation for design and attention to detail review these things before they are pushed to the world?

Previously:

Update (2023-09-04): Greg Hurrell:

Never used the app or even knew it existed, but I remember back around 2000 when Apple was the place to get movie trailers in high quality, as they pushed hard to market QuickTime and their hardware as the premiere technology for media reproduction and production.

Samuel Axon (Hacker News):

Unfortunately, the trailer section of the TV app lacks most of the features that iTunes Movie Trailers had—there are no sorting options, for example.

So pour one out for a truly classic web service—a relic of another era that was not that long ago but somehow feels like another epoch of the Earth. You might be surprised it was still around, but it's sad to see it go.

2 Comments RSS · Twitter · Mastodon

Well, F*^&*&k!

I've had the iTunes Movie Trailers web site open in a Safari window for years, every couple weeks refreshing it and command clicking all the newer trailers and then going through them. No messing around, easy to see which trailers I'd watched already based on the link color, enough information to skip obviously uninteresting trailers.

Damn. Well that sucks.

I found this surprisingly sad. The site was such a cornerstone of the web back in the early 2000's.

I haven't been there for years though, but it was definitely one of the first three trans I would open in a browser.

🫡

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