Back to Mobile View

Skip to Content

Why Apple.com hosts movie trailers

by Mike Schramm Mar 10th 2011 at 4:00AM

Here's a pretty interesting story about why Apple.com, of all places, hosts movie trailers. It all goes back to that first Star Wars: The Phantom Menace trailer back around 1998 (which I watched hundreds of times, before I saw the actual, less exciting movie).

Over on Quora, a former Apple employee named Chad Little says that "Lucasfilm had posted a rather crappy trailer on their site, and the team at Apple was appalled." So Apple allegedly went back and looked up DNS records to contact the Lucas team, and it had the movie encoded with QuickTime rather than the RealVideo that was being used. At the time, Apple hosted the trailer with a little company called Akamai, which has since grown into one of the world's biggest providers of web hosting.

The deal worked so well that Apple ended up hosting other movie trailers, and in recent years those trailers have served as great demos for iTunes and the Apple TV service as well. Little claims that Apple doesn't actually pay for content rights, but movie companies get to share their trailers in a common space, and Apple gets great branding and display content for its QuickTime video specs.

[via Slashfilm]



View Tags

Related Stories

Categories

iTunes Apple

Here's a pretty interesting story about why Apple.com, of all places, hosts movie trailers. It all goes back to that first Star Wars:...
 

Add a Comment

Sign in »
*0 / 3000 Character Maximum Comment Moderation Enabled. Your comment will appear after it is cleared by an editor.

11 Comments

Filter by:
Tomahawk

I wish Apple would just put a Apple Trailers app, or let someone else do it for them. The already rejected one app that did this http://www.macstories.net/news/apple-rejects-trailers-app-for-using-apples-public-rss-feeds/

but they have yet to release an easy way to navigate the trailers from the website with an iPhone/iPod Touch

March 10 2011 at 8:30 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
brian

Also, QuickTime 3 was new at the time and by being the #1 spot for a high-quality Ep1 trailer Apple got a lot of people to upgrade. QT3 was the first time the extra-cost "pro" option was added and the free QT3 player actually had FEWER features than the QuickTime Player 2.5 it replaced. People were not happy at the time. And QuickTime, at the time, looked worse than comparably-sized MPEGs.

March 10 2011 at 12:29 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Rock Lobster

Akamai is still used for the delivery of trailers, in addition to a substantial amount of other Apple content.

Just do a "dig" on "trailers.apple.com", it's clear to see.

I still make use of trailers a lot on my Apple TV, although as with others here I don't often go to the website any more.

March 10 2011 at 10:28 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Rain-man

This is the real source: http://www.quora.com/How-did-Apple-com-become-the-de-facto-spot-for-movie-trailers

March 10 2011 at 10:11 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
jaysunem

A lot of people couldn't care less since they are just watching it on a notebook screen, but if you want to play them on a big TV, apple's site is the best.

March 10 2011 at 8:57 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Ld

Trailer channel on ATV is a great time killer.

March 10 2011 at 8:26 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Mohammed Al-Muhaidib

Me too.. Still go there when I need HD trailers

March 10 2011 at 5:44 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Michael Scrip

Before Youtube... Apple.com was the go-to place for movie trailers.

Nice to know the history after all these years!

March 10 2011 at 4:54 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
3 replies to Michael Scrip's comment
Buy an ad here

Tweets

© 2012 AOL Inc. All Rights Reserved.