I did, and I was curious.
First, a little history: we were cord cutters and binge watchers before they were cool. Thankfully, the video streaming services came along and made it all a little less painful. In addition to those services, we relied on RedBox to watch newer movies. But have you ever tried to get a new movie through RedBox on a weekend? Even if you get it reserved, sometimes you have to wait in line at the kiosk for quite awhile to pick it up and to return it. And how many times have you rented a movie from RedBox and then forgotten to take it back the next day, or even the day after that?
History lesson #2: We are super picky about what our kids watch. Like to the extreme. We wouldn't let our preschoolers watch PG movies and have always had a no-PG-13 movies before your 13 rule at our house.*(see postscript) AJ cannot wait for his 13th birthday weekend next month so he can binge watch all the Marvel movies. We've already warned him that just because he's 13, doesn't give him a free pass to all PG-13 movies. There are many PG-13 movies I won't even watch. Call me a prude, that's OK. For the sake of brevity, I won't go into all my reasons for this.
So when I heard that VidAngel was about the same price as RedBox, but you never had to leave your house to use it, I was intrigued. Then I heard that you could use their services to filter movies for language, sex, and violence and I was very intrigued.
The way VidAngel works, and what makes the filtering legal, is that you must purchase the movie first, usually for about $20. They explain this is a very clear way on their website. (Hats off to the team there for making it very easy to understand). When you are done watching the movie, you sell it back, minus a small rental fee of $1 for SD and $2 for HD per day you have the movie. You can set this to automatically happen so you never forget, or it prompts you when you get to the end of the movie. Instead of refunding the money back to your credit card, it credits your VidAngel account the difference so when you want to get another movie, it only charges your credit card the difference between the cost of the movie and what's in your VidAngel account.
And yes, you can absolutely choose to watch any movie on the site without any filter at all, just like if you were renting it from RedBox or a streaming service. It's still easier than RedBox and cheaper than the rest. But the filtering system is very well thought out too. You can choose the level of filtering that you want, even down to specific swear words you do or don't want to hear, the level of violence and the level of bodice-ripping scenes you are comfortable watching. It even tells you for each movie exactly how many times each word appears or how much of the movie you'll miss if you have the violence or sex filter set to different levels. It's completely user friendly and you have the option of setting universal filters for all the movies you watch, or setting a filter for a specific movie. Another hat's off to VidAngel for that.
So this weekend we tried it out. Our movie of choice was Back to the Future. I was about the same age as my oldest was when Back to the Future came out and I remember loving it the first time I saw it. There was a boy at my junior high that had the same exact outfit as Marty McFly and I thought he was about the coolest thing ever. So three or four years ago we thought it would be a fun movie to show our kids. Holy cow, Marty McFly has a POTTY MOUTH! Did we really swear that much in 1985? Surely not in 1955! I don't think we even finished the movie that time through. So I thought it would be a great movie to tryout VidAngel.
We rented it in SD because I'm cheap. No really, I wanted to see if I would even notice it was in SD and I did not (but I am not a video-quality snob either). The video and audio were crisp and clear and even on our moderate DSL connection, the video never lagged. It started as quickly as Netflix and the quality was on par with other services we've used.
The filter worked well too. Since I have seen Back to the Future a few dozen times, and I thought the violence and sex scenes were pretty mild, I only filtered for language. (I picked what many would consider a family friendly movie in the first place.) Let's be clear here though, the filters job is just to blank the word out. In a movie with lots of swearing, you just hear quiet where the word was suppose to be. It isn't like watching a TV-edited version where they dub a G-rated word over the top. That kind of takes some getting use to, and of course, my lip-reading 12 year old had no trouble figuring out what word or string of words filled in the void. But I didn't have to hear the words and that made the movie more enjoyable for me and less squirmy about showing it to my boys.
Over all, I would recommend using VidAngel to watch movies, whether you want to filter your movies or not. We will continue to use it in place of RedBox for movies that aren't available on other streaming sites, or for movies we'd like to be a little more family friendly.
While I am not affiliated with VidAngel, and wrote this blog piece based on what I really think of the service, they did offer me a referral code to share with my friends that will earn my family free movies if people use it this week. So if you think it might be something you are interested in trying out, feel free to use this link: https://www.vidangel.com/vip/d9d2qkua/u
*We did break our own PG-13 rule and took our boys to see The Force Awakens. But it wasn't a decision we took lightly. We talked to several friends and neighbors we trust who had already seen it about the content of the movie first. And they were right, the movie was about the same level of violence as the first three moves that were PG and there was no extreme language or bodice-ripping scenes in it at all. However, before the movie started, they showed previews for movies that were too intense for my 10 year old and regretted having him sit through those.
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