post-sign-off timeshare service (from as early as midnight to as late as 6:00 a.m. local time). One key legal point in Turner's contracts with programming distributors and advertisers was that they continued to charge him for programming content and commercial time as if his station were reaching only a local market. No one had thought of adding contract language to deal with satellite-delivered broadcasts of a television station to a much larger region. Turner Communications Group also chose to revise its advertising rates to better reflect WTCG's national cable audience in October 1978. Also setting WTCG apart from other superstations that would soon follow in its footsteps was that it directly promoted its programming to its national audience, made investments in programming production as well as acquisitions, and charged separate advertising rates at the national and local levels. Given Turner's deep pockets, the station paid for syndicated programming at (albeit reasonably cheaper) rates comparable to other national networks, rather than merely receiving royalty payments from cable systems for programs to which it held the copyright. Cable systems found WTCG—one of the few American television stations offering a 24-hour-a-day programming schedule at the time—an attractive offering as it had an extensive film library heavily reliant on classic feature films (amounting to 30 movies per week out of the 2,700 titles that Turner had accrued since taking over the station), high-profile syndicated programs and games from various Atlanta-area sports teams (including the Atlanta Braves Major League Baseball club, the Atlanta Hawks of the NBA - both of which were owned by Turner - and the Atlanta Flames of the NHL). Soon after it was uplinked, an increasing number of cable television systems throughout the United States sought to carry WTCG as part of their channel lineups, ultimately making it the most widely distributed superstation for the rest of its existence under the format. By May 1978, WTCG was being received by 1.5 million households in 45 states, with figures suggesting that its reach had been increasing at the rate of 100,000 cable households per month; by the end of that year, the station was available through cable systems in all 50 states. By July 1979, the station (by then, known as WTBS) was available to 4.8 million cable subscribers plus an additional 556,000 households that received the station through other distribution methods (including microwave and MMDS services). By 1987, WTBS was available