William Gallagher
Apple began transitioning whoever is left watching the iTunes Movie Trailers iPhone app, over to its TV one weeks ago, but now the famous service is finished.
As AppleInsider noted when the first signs of the app disappearing became obvious, iTunes Movie Trailers on iOS has had 16 minor updates in 11 years. It's just had its 17th — and despite Apple saying it adds "a number of minor performance and stability improvements," it does not.
To be fair, the app's functionality is indeed now stable and it does perform quickly — but everything it's ever done before is gone. All the app does now is tell you that "Apple TV app is the new home of iTunes Movie Trailers," and has an Open button that takes you there.
At the same time, the online iTunes Movie Trailers site has also been gutted. Going to trailers.apple.com now simply bounces straight through to tv.apple.com.
It's not a surprising end, given how trailers are now prevalent on YouTube, and given how the iTunes Movie Trailers app and site have been neglected.
Yet it is a sad moment because this app and site hark back to a time when Apple was still in trouble — and movie trailers were surprisingly helpful. Movie trailers demonstrated how enormously superior Apple's QuickTime video player was to Microsoft's Windows.
It became the place to go to see all the new trailers, and all the film companies wanted to be on it.
That was back in the late 1990s, though, so despite the neglect, despite its unheralded demise, iTunes Movie Trailers had a good run.
Charles Martin
Christine McKee
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Andrew Orr
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3 Comments
I really liked the Trailers app, especially the calendar view that listed movies by release date including scheduled releases for the next few months. I don’t see any of that functionality duplicated in the Apple TV app, which was already bloated with the store, library, and Apple TV+ crammed together.
The new trailers app is hard to find, I found it once and used it but couldn't seem to find it again. Also the usability is confusing and was unable to make sense of what has just been released. Yeah, not a big fan.
I believe the main reason for deprecating Trailers is the fact that the Apple TV app on smart TVs does not allow app stores where you can download apps like YouTube and MAX. And since the trailer is a standalone app it can't be downloaded in Apple TV on smart TVs. So they just plopped it in the Apple TV app.
Yup... I recently bought a smart TV that has the Apple TV app but I ended up buying the Apple TV hardware anyways since it was missing stuff, and ran slower.