Apple is sunsetting its long-running iTunes Movie Trailers app as it begins hosting movie trailers exclusively in the company's flagship TV app, MacRumors can report.
Hints of Apple's plan first emerged on August 9, when MacRumors discovered a non-linked banner on the iTunes Movie Trailers website that reads "Apple TV app is the new home of iTunes Movie Trailers." The same banner has since started showing up on both of Apple's iOS and tvOS apps of the same name.
Then last night, some Apple TV users in the United States reported seeing a new section in the TV app titled "Watch the Latest Trailers," with a main selection card showing the original iTunes Movie Trailers logo, but titled "Movie & TV Trailers."
The new section in the TV app is not yet showing for users in the United Kingdom, and possibly elsewhere, and when iPhone and iPad users in the U.K. tap the banner in the original iTunes Movie Trailers app they are bounced back to the app, suggesting Apple has not yet completed its rollout of the merge.
Regardless, the writing appears to be on the wall for the iTunes Movie Trailers app, which hasn't been updated in five years. The free app was launched on iOS in October 2011 in the U.S., offering iPhone and iPad users easy access to Apple's library of movie trailers. Closing the app is likely part of Apple's strategy to gradually wind down the iTunes branding and bring all of its video content under the same umbrella.
It's not entirely clear what this means for Apple's iTunes Movie Trailers website, which is still sporting some archaic interface elements that don't at all align with Apple's modern web design.
The site has been hosted on apple.com since the late 1990s and was originally titled "Quicktime Movie Trailers," to showcase Apple's QuickTime software and its ability to host downloadable movie trailers online at high resolution – higher than many Hollywood movie studios could achieve – in the days before YouTube.
Slightly off topic - I wonder how long iTunes is going to stay around?
Both as a brand as as the actual service.
I mean it looks embarrassingly old in the Music app now.
Surely it makes sense for Apple to give it its own app on all Apple platforms so that Music can move forward?
Music does seem to be a little bit of a prisoner of the past still:
i.e. the way it has to host iTunes Music Store, your library and integrate downloaded music and iTunes music into your Apple Music streaming library.
This is a very unApple thing - they're usually ruthless about killing 'legacy' services/features.
They're not gonna kill the iTunes Store. iTunes is still the only place to buy music digitally, and they spent too long getting all the record labels and estates to host their music onto iTunes. Remember in November 2010 when there was a massive frenzy that Apple got the entire Beatles catalog on iTunes, which at the time was considered impossible. It was such a big thing that they had billboards all across the US and UK announcing "Yes! We finally did it! We actually got the Beatles!"
They may rebrand the iTunes Store as the Apple Music Store, but they're not gonna get rid of the store. It would be a stupid move to do that and be a loss of a revenue stream.
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They may rebrand the iTunes Store as the Apple Music Store, but they're not gonna get rid of the store. It would be a stupid move to do that and be a loss of a revenue stream.
/s