WPIX) during the early 1990s, allowing for further expansion of its distribution reach. EMI estimated simultaneous losses of 500,000 subscribers and an increase of around one million households to its cable distribution of WWOR, the latter being attributed to some local cable systems adding the Syndex-proof WWOR EMI Service feed. Most complaints over the removal of some regional and quasi-national superstations were because of the loss of access to coverage from regional professional sports teams (such as the Boston Red Sox via WSBK, the Texas Rangers and Dallas Mavericks via KTVT and the New York Yankees via WPIX), leading some systems to resort to cherrypicking sports from the removed superstations to mollify subscribers and local politicians acceding to complaints from their constituents by pushing other cable systems to seek solutions to resume sporting events lost through the removal of those superstations. (For example, amid public pressure from the Providence City Council and Rhode Island Department of Public Utilities and Carriers, Dimension Cable Services's Providence, Rhode Island system [now operated by Cox Communications], which removed the 24-hour WPIX feed upon the Syndex rollout, began placing the station's Yankees telecasts on a local origination channel in May 1990, in exchange for paying United Video full-time copyright fees.) The WWOR EMI Service—despite having SyndEx-proofed its programming schedule—and WPIX would each see their distribution erode during the early 1990s, as some of the cable affiliates that carried either superstation began replacing them with the WGN national feed. The passage of the Satellite Home Viewer Act of 1988 on October 19, 1988, extended the compulsory license to direct-to-home (DTH) satellite services, protecting distribution of broadcast signals to dish owners under existing copyright statutes. (The act's provisions primarily benefited so-called "affiliate superstations," provided that the distant network stations could only be distributed to "unserved households" that were unable to receive a local affiliate off-air.) For many years after the passage of SyndEx for cable systems, the satellite television industry remained exempt from syndication exclusivity regulations, resulting in subscribers of direct broadcast satellite and C-Band providers continuing to be able to view all programming seen on the local broadcast signals of national and regional superstations (except where the provider already offered the SyndEx-compliant cable feed). An FCC inquiry on whether SyndEx rules should be applied to home dish services concluded in January 1991 that extending those rules to satellite "would be technically and economically infeasible" as equipment