Filtering Films: An Empirical Study of What Consumers Would Mute and Excise from Hollywood Fare if Only They Could

Abstract

In 2016, the technology startup VidAngel offered a movie streaming service that empowered users to mute potentially offensive audio and cut potentially offensive video from Hollywood films. Copyright litigation forced VidAngel’s service offline in December of that year. But, in the preceding eleven-and-a-half months, VidAngel manage to transmit roughly four million filtered streams and, for each of them, recorded not only which filters were applied, but also how many minutes of the resulting films each user then in fact watched. In this Article, we use the VidAngel data to study the market for filtered motion picture content. Among our findings, we find that video filters were primarily used to filter scenes involving intimacy, rather than those related to violence; and that, while the most common filtered audio was the word “f*ck,” users were even more likely to mute the words “Christ” and “dink” if they were uttered in a film. Overall, even the most cautious viewers used filters as scalpels, not sledgehammers, muting and excising only a tiny fraction of a film’s content. And, perhaps most surprisingly, despite the imperfections inevitably introduced by unscripted interruptions in a movie’s audio and video presentation, users who watched filtered films turned out to enjoy them to roughly the same degree as did users who watched the corresponding unedited equivalents.