In its uphill battle to provide filtered movie content to viewers, VidAngel seems to have pulled out its harnesses and caribeeners for a truly vertical climb.
The journey began in 2016 when a group of major film studios, including Warner Brothers, 20th Century Fox, Lucasfilm, and, ironically, Disney Enterprises, sued VidAngel for copyright infringement over VidAngel's business model providing edited movies for viewers who like that sort of thing. The suit resulted in a court-granted preliminary injunction prohibiting VidAngel from using its current model of "Disc-Based service" filtering.
VidAngel switched to a new delivery mode in early 2017 in order to continue providing filtering services without violating the terms of the injunction, but this new path is equally fraught with obstacles that might be insurmountable. After it lost an appeal for the original judgment, VidAngel submitted a motion to revise the injunction so that it no longer prohibits VidAngel's new model for filtering content.
The earlier injunction was issued while VidAngel's business model included purchasing multiple copies of a film, decrypting one copy, tagging elements for filtering, and then streaming the copy into the home of a user who had "purchased" the copy for $20 with the option to sell it back for $19. The studios took issue with the business model because it was operating as a licensed streaming service without paying the same licensing fees as other streaming services like Amazon and Netflix.
In its attempts to overcome this particular obstruction, VidAngel now pays licensed streaming services (LSSs) for decrypted streams. This system, in essence, piggybacks off the LSS's streaming to provide users with edited content. VidAngel has notified each of the LSSs of what it is doing and has received no complaints from them. It argues, therefore, in its motion to modify the preliminary injunction, that this new service ameliorates the defects in the old "Disc-Based" service on which the injunction was based. Since the studios have not been able to show any concrete, financial harm in the new business model, VidAngel believes that the preliminary injunction should not and does not apply and requests that the court clarify this finding by modifying its original terms.
The studios have argued that VidAngel's motion has no specific authority supporting it and, unsurprisingly, intend to oppose it. Given VidAngel's multiple failed attempts to save its streaming service, both on the appellate level and in bankruptcy court, the prospects look grim. But even a "two steps forward and one step back" approach may yield progress in the long run. Meanwhile, VidAngel continues its efforts to claw its way to the top, embodying the idea, attributed to Einstein, that "you never fail until you stop trying."