‘The Phantom Menace’ Trailer Changed the Internet Forever!

The Phantom Menace trailer came out 26 years ago today, and thanks to Steve Jobs and an MIT graduate student, it changed the internet for years to come.

The beginning:

• The first trailer for The Phantom Menace was released on November 18th, 1998

• 75 theaters premiered the trailer in front of Meet Joe Black, The Waterboy, and The Siege

• Because YouTube didn’t exist yet, the trailer was also available to download from StarWars.com in Real Time, QuickVideo, and AVI formats

The sequel:

• The second trailer for the film came in March 1999, was much longer, and an even more massive hit

• The trailer was available exclusively in Apple’s QuickTime format and led to over 600,000 downloads of QuickTime in a single day

• 24 hours in, the trailer had been viewed over 1 million times, and the number jumped to 3.5 million over the next 5 days

• Steve Jobs called the trailer "the biggest Internet download event in history”

The tech:

• The amount of increased web traffic due to the trailer threatened to crash any site

• Thankfully, a company called Akami, founded by MIT graduate student Danny Lewin and his advisor Professor F. Thomson Leighton, came up with an algorithm that could handle the traffic flawlessly and was used for other events like ESPN’s March Madness

The hype for The Phantom Menace was unlike anything Star Wars had ever seen before and always serves a reminder just how exciting it can be to return to a galaxy far, far away.