This article was published on September 27, 2011

Showreel brings the latest and greatest movie trailers to your iPad in gorgeous HD


Showreel brings the latest and greatest movie trailers to your iPad in gorgeous HD

The App Store is teeming with movie and entertainment apps that bring you trailers, showtimes, box office charts, news and everything else related to Hollywood that you could possibly want; but Showreel is all about the best in movie trailers.

Built by iOS app-maker Riot, whose other apps on the App Store are Converse for the iPad and Shaken for the iPhone, Showreel is a gorgeously designed app that stands out of the pack due to its relentless minimalism. It brings you a selection of movie trailers every week, handpicked by the developers, and all you have to do is sit back and watch them.

Once you get past the beautiful splash screen, Showreel brings up a view with a row of movie posters at the bottom of the display and the movie info front and centre. Among the info is a larger version of the poster, the year of release, tagline, short description, credits, MPAA rating and copyright information.

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You can scroll through the tray at the bottom to get to all the trailers currently available for viewing from within the app. As we mentioned before, the selection has intentionally been limited to the latest and, in the opinion of the developers, best trailers doing the rounds that week. Therefore, you’ll usually only be able to select between about 15 and 18 trailers.

When you hit the blue Play Trailer button, the playback interface takes over the screen and starts buffering the video. The video itself is in 720p high definition, so it requires a reasonably fast connection in order to play it back without delay. Clearly, that will exclude a lot of people from being able to enjoy the app, but for those who do have a fat broadband pipe, Showreel’s no-nonsense approach is a welcome change for the do-it-all apps.

That said, however, Showreel’s very limited selection of trailers is also a significant point against it, and you may want to take a look at the official Internet Movie Database (IMDb) app, Moviefone or Trailrs for a more comprehensive option. And you can always get your trailer fix from Apple’s own movie trailers website, which obviously works fantastically well with the iPad.

With all those other free and more feature-rich options to compete against, Showreel is clearly not going to be the trailer app of choice for everyone. But if you want to sit back with your iPad, glance at a few posters and then get to watching the best trailers of the week in high definition, Showreel is exactly the app you want.

[Showreel is available on the App Store at $2.99 for all iPads running iOS 4.3 or later.]

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