It was set up to pioneer the concept of renting videocassettes through mail, which led to failure where each week, tapes kept disappearing somewhere in the postal system, much to the chagrin of VidAmerica executives as they considered stamping the packages a "nuclear waste" before giving up on long-distance retail.

It also originally had an exclusive rental contract with United Artists during its second year of existence (1980), as VidAmerica distributed 20 titles from the UA library (e.g.

According to VidAmerica president Al Markim, the rental market's hottest sellers were then-new movies, sports blockbusters, "and the kind of material you can't see on free TV, like Oh Calcutta!".

The company even did offer a few soft-porn adult movies like Emanuelle in Bangkok, despite Markim's insistence that VidAmerica would never market hard-core pornography or X-rated films.

[12] In 1986, the company was purchased by a consortium controlled by billionaire investor Ronald O. Perelman called Compact Video (his holdings also included Revlon, Four Star International, and New World Entertainment).