VidAngel issued temporary injunction but keeps fighting. The streaming service that allows viewers to filter out offensive material has been in court these past few months. The injunction is a major loss for VidAngel, and Christian families everywhere, but the battle is not over yet!
VidAngel, the market-leading entertainment platform which empowers users to filter language, nudity, violence, and other content from movies and TV shows, has been is engaged in a high-profile legal battle with Disney, Warner Bros, 20th Century Fox, and Lucasfilm. These Hollywood studios have taken legal action to gut the 2005 Family Movie Act and to prevent VidAngel from lawfully empowering parents and families to filter content on modern devices in their homes.
Today, Judge Andre Birotte, Jr. granted Disney’s request for a Preliminary Injunction against VidAngel pending trial. Neal Harmon, CEO of VidAngel, offered the following statement:
“Hollywood studios have followed a repeated pattern in their decades-long campaign to put movie filtering services out of business by seeking a shut- down decision in trial court. Previously, such a decision has signaled the end of the legal battle. As such, while we are extremely disappointed—for the countless people who rely on our service regularly to enjoy movies using filters—our customers have given us not just the mandate to fight this battle all the way to the Supreme Court, but the financial resources as well. We will aggressively pursue an appeal and take this case to a higher level where we have always believed we will ultimately prevail.”
VidAngel is the only service that allows consumers to filter out offensive content while streaming the remaining content to their personal viewing devices, wherever they happen to be. VidAngel has been operating within both the spirit and the letter of the Family Movie Act. VidAngel allows each parent and each family to consume entertainment content precisely in accord with their unique standards.
To fund its legal expenses, VidAngel has reached out to customers in a Regulation A+ offering, as reported recently by Equities.com. Reg A+ of Title IV of the JOBS Act is a type of offering that allows private companies to raise up to $50 Million from the public.
VidAngel with their fast Reg A+ Raise has raised has raised $10 mill from 7,550 investors and have completed their offering. They went live October 19th in the evening and closed their first tranche of $6.25 mill on Oct 21st. Director of Finance, Patrick Reilly, after completing the first tranche, paused their offering for a week to figure out how to accept investors from the states with more restrictive rules for offerings that do not include a national broker-dealer (TX and FL included). Then he reopened the offering on October 28th and closed it on the 31st, having reached their goal of $10 mill. The two tranches together took all of five days to fill.
VidAngel provides a custom movie filtering service through which consumers buy the movie of their choice for $20 and use VidAngel’s program to remove the undesirable parts of the movie. The consumer can watch the movie and sell it back to VidAngel for $19, leaving a net cost of $1 for the entire experience.
For its court case, many national leaders have submitted declarations to the court in support of VidAngel. VidAngel has had the best of legal representation. VidAngel has been temporarily struck down but not struck out.
We are pressed on all sides, but not crushed… not in despair…struck down, but not destroyed…
II Corinthians 4:8
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