This is a Thing: VidAngel

This is a new segment for my blog called "This is a Thing." This ongoing series will cover...things.

This week's thing is VidAngel.

VidAngel is an online movie service that offers the option of filtering your movies.

Irony: their logo looks like an adult film company's,

Isn't This Censorship?

Yep. But it's voluntary. You can get movies from VidAngel and watch them totally uncut if you like. Or if you want to only delete the word "balls" and leave it uncut otherwise, you can do that, too. (But only if you have no balls.)

Companies in Utah have been trying to crack this market for years. Most notoriously, CleanFlicks was a video rental store that edited the movies themselves and re-burned them onto DVDs and rented them out to customers.

Problem: that was illegal duplication AND profiting off a product they weren't licensed to distribute AND the specific way they were editing was ruled illegal. For this and other reasons, CleanFlicks and the rest of the edited-video stores were wiped off the map under a deluge of lawsuits. (Video stores died shortly thereafter, so they probably would have disappeared, anyway.)

The whole saga was chronicled in the documentary Cleanflix, which took a dark third-act twist that I'm totally not gonna spoil here. But it's a doozy.

So How's It Work?

You start an account and set your filters to whatever you like. You want nudity gone? Click, gone. You want graphic violence gone? Click, gone. Then pick from a buffet of pottymouth and decide what words you don't want to hear.

Then you can use the website (or an app on your Roku/smart TV) to order whatever movie or show you like.

It will cost $20, as you're technically "buying" it.

Once you bought it, VidAngel will apply the filters you want and you can watch it on your computer or app or wherever.

And the next day you "sell it back" to VidAngel for $19. (You get $18 if it was an HD file.)

So the end result is: you paid $1 (SD) or $2 (HD) on a one-day movie rental. (Oh, and you can set it to automatically "sell back" the movie the next day so you don't have to worry about that step.)

This Can't Be Legal

It is. (Or not? See update at bottom of article.)

Now it seems like if you own a video file- in any format- you are free to manipulate it, remix it, censor it, do whatever you want to it. Kinda true, but it won't hold up in court. So this site doesn't manually edit films. It just "tags" parts of the movie that you can choose to have dropped after you buy it. It's an automatic process. Loophole!

End result: it's as legal as watching a DVD and hitting the "Mute" button when a character starts cussing. Or fast-forwarding through a sex scene.

Now- it would be illegal if you resold the movie with modified filters. Or duplicated it. But with VidAngel, you're not re-selling it or duplicating it. Just watching it.

It would also be illegal, probably, if the video company modified the movie while in their possession and sold it to you in a modified form. That's not happening here, though. The movie you "buy" comes to you complete and uncut. It's not modified by the filters you choose until after you already own it.

And they even found a way around being a rental service. The "buy/sellback" gag keeps them in seller terrain.

It's airtight. These guys found all the loopholes.

C'mon- This Is At Least a Spirit of the Law Violation

Yep.

They're totally renting movies to you under the guise of selling them and buying them back. No doubt, no diggity.

This loophole is like if a conservative Christian couple went to Las Vegas and got married, had lotsa sex, then got the marriage annulled to avoid any accusations of premarital sex.

But it's still legal.

How Are They Pulling This Off?

Good question, and I don't have the answer to that.

The filtering process is simple enough- they have a crowd-sourced army of folks that manually tag the movies for parts that you can choose to have removed.

But as far as getting the rights to the movies- I'm mystified.

This service sells Game of Thrones episodes. HBO doesn't even sell Game of Thrones episodes. You have to buy HBO- or HBO GO- to watch that show. (Consequently, it's the most pirated show in the world.)

But you can "buy/sellback" each episode here for $1 a pop. ($2 if you want HD.)

Hopefully VidAngel has the licensing rights to do this. If they don't, they're gonna get shut down faster than you can say "winter is coming."

But considering how legally savvy this company's been with finding the copyright and editing loopholes, it's extremely unlikely that they'd be dumb enough not to license the content they "sell."

But I haven't seen their business paperwork, so I can't confirm or deny.

Alright, Fine. How'd It Work for You?

Pretty good. We rented The Martian and the Game of Thrones pilot.

Pros:

-The HD image quality is perfect. This looks as good as anything on Netflix, if not better.

-Even SD image quality looks okay. Good choice if you wanna save $1, are watching on a small screen, or your vision is blurry anyway.

-The verbal filtering was mostly smooth, with audio dissolves and sometimes ambient sound left to cover the gap of silence.

-Decent selection. They have a bunch of brand new movies and a handful of classics. Lots of movies that aren't available on Netflix or Amazon.

-The VidAngel app on the Roku is great. Easy to navigate, really nice and smooth-looking.

-It has a "Inspiring" meter, which rates how inspiring the movie is on a scale of 1 to 100.

-It gives you a visual preview of how much you'll miss, audio-wise and video-wise, with your filters set on a movie, along with how much shorter the movie will be. Helpful for deciding if it's worth it.

Looks like the audio is more off than on for this one.

-GREAT PRICE. Even if you watch the movies unfiltered, $2 for an HD movie or $1 for an SD movie is a really good deal. Cheaper than Redbox.

Cons:

-When the verbal filtering didn't work, it was jarring and took you out of the movie. Sometimes they delete a whole sentence just to get rid of a word and that can be disorienting and annoying.

-The nudity filter is confusing. We set it on "Both Men and Women," thinking that would cover all nudity. Nope. That only filters out scenes where BOTH men and woman are naked. If it's just a woman or just Matt Damon's butt strolling through the scene, it leaves them in there. You have to manually click "Men" and "Women" if you want both gone.

-It offers a "Disturbing Images" filter. Who decides what's disturbing? And sometimes a scene being disturbing is the point.

Here's another review with more thoughts about the service, if you're interested. It's almost a year old, so most of the glitches mentioned in there have been fixed.

This is Troubling. What About Respecting the Filmmakers' Artistic Vision?

You have a point. Also VidAngel is a funny thing for me to review because I watch some pretty toxic stuff. (I don't hide it- I discuss this junk right here on this blog!) I became a horror junkie at a very young age and I have an encyclopedic knowledge of horror and weird cinema. I drift in and out of enthusiasm for the genre- I'm mighty sick of the jump-scare and torture-porn subgenres- but it's remained something I love throughout life.

And I also belong to a religion that conditions its youth to believe that a movie magically becomes immoral when the arbitrary label of "R" is applied to it. I joined this religion as an adult, so I probably see more gray than black and white on this issue. And I admit- my opinion on this issue may be wrong. Ask me next month or next year and my opinion might change. But the last word on this religion vs. ratings argument was dropped here. I can't say it any better. (Though I will say that the morality of Amazing Spider-Man 2 is way more troubling than anything in Shawshank Redemption.)

I mean- from a business perspective, this thing is great. I've been saying for years that Hollywood is stupidly leaving money on the table by not offering an online video rental service that lets you filter movies/shows however you like. They could expand their movies' audiences drastically if they let people watch their movies with the nastiest stuff gone. And VidAngel pulled it off.

But if you care about film- is an edited movie even worth watching? Is it better for people to look at a damaged work of art or to not look at that work of art at all?

It really depends. If integrity and vision are really important to you, this service is not for you (Unless- again- you'd like to ignore the filters and use it to rent movies on the cheap).

There's a longer debate to be had about censorship and respecting a filmmaker's intention. But the Cleanflix documentary already nailed this question pretty well. (Angry as the Hollywood directors in that documentary got about the notion of Cleanflicks editing their movies, I've never heard any of them complain about their movies getting censored and shown on airplanes or network TV or basic cable. What's the difference?)

But if movies are just a diversion for you and you don't think about them too deeply, this is a perfectly legit way for you to watch movies without getting hit with objectionable content that makes it harder for you to enjoy the experience.

(Update 6/30/16: They got sued. Hard. Comes at an awkward time, as they just recently announced they're opening up for investments. I read the lawsuit paperwork and there's an awful lot of grey area in there. But the part that interests me: the studios claim Vidangel is illegally ripping movies from discs and using those as the files that they (wink-wink, nudge-nudge) "sell." I think VidAngel has a pretty solid defense on a lot of fronts, but I'm curious to see how they defend the illegal disc-ripping allegation. That smells like a "Gotcha.")

-Phony McFakename

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