VidAngel
The business, the turning points, and the decisions behind them.
01 / WHAT IT BUILT
What the company did
VidAngel is an American streaming company founded in 2013 in Provo, Utah by the Harmon brothers and launched in 2014. It lets viewers skip objectionable content — profanity, nudity, sexual situations, graphic violence — through customizable filters. Its original model bought DVDs and Blu-rays, reserved one disc per customer, streamed a filtered master copy, and let the customer sell the copy back, for a net cost of $1 per day; it raised $10 million from customer-investors through equity crowdfunding. After a copyright lawsuit forced it into Chapter 11 in 2017, it reorganized around filtering streams from Netflix and Amazon, settled in 2020, and survived — splitting in 2021 into VidAngel Entertainment and Angel Studios.
02 / VidAngel FAILURE REASONS
Failure reasons
The original business model was legally doomed: in June 2016 Disney, Warner Bros., Lucasfilm and 20th Century Fox sued, alleging VidAngel decrypted DVDs and streamed unlicensed filtered copies in violation of the DMCA. Courts rejected its Family Movie Act defense, granted a preliminary injunction that the Ninth Circuit upheld, and cut off the disc-based business. VidAngel filed Chapter 11 in October 2017 as a legal strategy to pause the suit and reorganize around a streaming-overlay model. A 2019 jury awarded the studios $62.4 million; VidAngel settled for $9.9 million payable over 14 years in 2020, emerged from bankruptcy, and agreed never to stream the four studios' content. The failure was a copyright-infringing model that could not survive legal challenge.
03 / EVENT HISTORY
Events in the structured record
- Company founded
VidAngel was founded.
- Operations ended
VidAngel ended operations.
04 / CONTEMPORARY REBUILD ASSESSMENT
Difficulty of rebuilding this project today
Material for this section is being gathered and checked. It will appear here once ready.
Overall assessment: Not completed
05 / CAUSAL CHAIN
How the factors connect
- 01
2013–2014: founded in Provo; $1/day disc-based filtering model
- 02
June 2016: sued by four Hollywood studios; injunction upheld
- 03
October 2017: Chapter 11 filing as legal strategy; streaming-model pivot
- 04
2019: $62.4M jury award → 2020: $9.9M settlement; emerged from bankruptcy