If you were hoping to rent something from a service like this tonight, though, you’ll need to press pause on that thought: Disney, 20th Century Fox, Lucasfilm, and Warner Bros. MORE TO READ: Disney leads the charge in the rise of family entertainment To allow for these rules, VidAngel users buy a movie for $20, select the filters they desire, watch it, and then are reimbursed $19 when they “return” the film within 24 hours - making it a one-dollar movie rental service. VidAngel’s filtering is considered legal under the Family Movie Act as long as each movie is an authorized copy, watched in the privacy of the home, and not made into a permanent filtered copy. To see how it works in more detail (and maybe get a chuckle or two), watch the company’s advertisement here.Ĭurrently, the business model goes around licensing laws by buying the DVDs and decrypting them - similar to how Redbox operates the digital copy is then sold as a rental to consumers online. The filters can be very specific, allowing the customer to filter for all mature content or even just one specific word if they want to.

The site provides a large variety of films - boasting both new releases and all the IMDB top 100 films - with some rentals allowing you to select more than one hundred possible filters. But not everyone seems to agree that these types of services should be allowed, and VidAngel in particular has recently moved to the center of this debate.īut first, let’s talk about how the VidAngel service works: With the tagline “watch movies however the bleep you want,” VidAngel rents movies with the ability to filter your film for things like graphic violence, mature sexual content, and profane language. Other times, the solution is to stick to old favorites, or films you’ve already seen.īut what if a company did all that research for you, and all you had to do was “opt out” of certain scenes or press a button that would bleep the swear words? Well, companies called ClearPlay, which was founded in 1998, and VidAngel, which launched an online rental business in 2015, both had this very idea. Sometimes, even after that research, the solution is to be ready with your trigger finger on the fast-forward button to skip over explicit scenes - this is the method in my house more often than not. Ratings like PG or PG-13 are helpful in a very general way, but you still need to dig for the specifics if you want to know what kind of violence, or what is considered “strong language.” (The website is a helpful resource for parents researching these particulars.) It might be as simple as some bad language, or as complicated as sexual innuendo and violence (the level of which is hard to gauge without seeing it yourself). But there are so many times we end up watching nothing, or the same old movie because the new releases available to rent don’t fit the bill for one reason or another. But movie nights have always been tough, because I often need to do a lot of front-end research to make sure what we’re about to watch is not just good entertainment, but appropriate for her age.Īs a result, I’ve spent tons of my time looking through “family friendly” content categories on streaming services, and then looking up rating guides to decipher exactly what we’re about to see. We love spending time together, whether the minutes are filled with baking cookies, or watching TV shows and movies together. My youngest sister and I have always been very close, despite our 8-year age difference. But I still understand the frustration that comes with finding appropriate movies that a family can watch together - even at home on the small screen where rental and streaming options abound. I don’t have kids to raise or students to teach.

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