from the time it began operations, officially changed its call letters to WBMA-LP on September 23, 1997. In June 1998, ABC parent The Walt Disney Company entered into negotiations to purchase the eight Allbritton stations and the LMAs with WJSU and WJXX, reportedly offering the company more than $1 billion to acquire them (which if successful, would have made WBMA+ the Birmingham market's third network-owned station, alongside WBRC and WVTM, which operated as an NBC O&O from 1996 – when New World sold it to NBC Television Stations on May 22 of that year – until 2006, and Birmingham the smallest American television market with at least three major network O&Os). Negotiations between Disney and Allbritton broke down when the former dropped out of discussions to buy the stations the following month. Between May 26, 2008 and March 23, 2009, Nielsen Media Research mistakenly undercounted viewership for WBMA+ in its diary ratings tallies. Due to a "procedural error", ratings for WBMA-LP, and WCFT and WJSU respectively (which were traditionally measured collectively as "WBMA+" due to the unique trimulcast structure) failed to properly measure viewership through the three stations' digital signals – the feeds that were also distributed to local cable and satellite providers – together and combine them with ratings counts for their analog signals, resulting in ratings for WBMA's digital signal only being counted. The error significantly reduced the total viewership and ratings share estimates recorded to less than half of what station management expected. It was later explained that Nielsen had undercounted and overcounted the stations' viewership at various times between February 2008 and November 2009, as well as during a period in January 2010 that it had shortchanged WBMA+'s prime time ratings (including the registry of occasional zero shares for some ABC programs). The confusion stemmed from the station's unique three-station simulcasting setup. Acquisition by Sinclair For over a decade and a half, WBMA+ maintained a strong relationship with Allbritton, with no major problems arising between the two entities and, likewise, no major changes occurring to the station's operations. On July 29, 2013, Allbritton announced that it would sell its seven television stations, including WBMA+, to the Sinclair Broadcast Group (which would purchase the stations for $985 million), in an attempt by the company to shift its focus toward co-owned political news website, Politico. As part of the deal, Sinclair had intended to sell the license assets