VidAngel Files for Bankruptcy in an Effort to Keep Movie Filtering Alive
The legal battle wages on for the film filtering company VidAngel.
According to Forbes, VidAngel has filed for Chapter 11 Bankruptcy protection.
It’s a calculated attempt to put a stop on pending legal action and allow the company time to grow its new streaming service.
VidAngel is a movie filtering service that allowed users to filter the inappropriate parts of a film.
Using the VidAngel technology, a user could filter profanity, violence and other unwanted content.
According to its website, “religious viewers can remove the Lord’s name in vain. Trauma survivors can take out trigger scenes. And parents with young kids can cut scary moments.”
Although celebrated by many Christian groups, VidAngel has faced numerous legal woes.
In August, the company lost a copyright infringement and piracy lawsuit from 20th Century Fox, Disney, Lucas Film and Warner Bros Studios.
VidAngel has since turned its sights toward a new streaming option which allows customers to filter content from Netflix, Amazon and HBO.
According to VidAngel founder Neal Harmon, the bankruptcy will “protect [the] company – as well as its creditors, investors, and customers—from the plaintiff’s efforts to deny families their legal right to watch filtered content on modern devices.”
“It also gives us breathing room to reorganize our business around the new streaming platform, promote and perfect the new technology, and seek a legal determination that the new system is fully legal and not subject to the preliminary injunction entered in California,” Harmon continued.
VidAngel has tried different strategies to keep the service in existence. In June, Harmon told CBN News, "We had customers and families invest $10 million so we would fight this all the way to the Supreme Court, to provide them what they need and what they want, so failure wasn't an option."
