Why Do Movie Trailers Debut on Apple.com?

If you’ve ever wondered why so many movie trailers become available on Apple’s website and not anywhere else, the answer is provided on Quora by a former Apple employee. It’s got Star Wars in it:

It started as a showcase for QuickTime, at the time of first launch we only had a handful of trailers and one or two studios. It was really the Phantom Menace trailer that put apple.com/trailers into the spotlight. Lucasfilm had posted a rather crappy trailer on their site, the team at Apple was appalled. Through DNS records, the web team at Apple managed to contact the Star Wars web team and set up a meeting. That single trailer showcased QuickTime’s quality over RealVideo by leaps and bounds, and quickly surpassed over 1 million downloads to become the most popular web video of the internet in that time.

He also mentions the Akamai distribution technology (a little startup at the time) made the difference when talking to movie executives and showing them the speed and reliability of Apple’s network. Plus, the webpage design is also pretty sweet these days. [via]