relationship with the network—act as a de facto national feed for The WB to cover smaller and mid-sized markets where extra time was needed for the network to fill absences in local affiliate coverage. (The Tribune Company held minority ownership in The WB from August 1995 until the founding of successor The CW in January 2006, when the company relinquished its interest to avoid partially shouldering The WB's shutdown expenses.) Station management had expressed concerns over the potential negative impacts fulfilling commitments to the network's soon-to-be-expanded program offerings would have on its sports broadcast rights and, by association, its national distribution; Time Warner rectified those issues by agreeing to reduce the network's initial schedule to one night per week (from two) in exchange for leasing airtime on the WGN national feed. WGN carried the full WB programming schedule—including the Kids' WB children's program block, which was not carried by the WGN Chicago signal until 2004—nationwide from the network's January 1995 launch until October 1999, when carriage of the network (outside Chicago) was discontinued upon mutual agreement between Time Warner and Tribune/United Video to limit programming conflicts with The WB's initial charter affiliates and other local broadcast and cable-only affiliates that joined the network over the previous four years. In direct contrast, WWOR (owned at the time by network parent Chris-Craft/United Television) restricted availability of UPN programming to its New York-area signal, believed to be the result of a network non-duplication claim filed by non-equity network partner Paramount Television that prohibited Eastern Microwave from using the WWOR EMI Service as a national UPN feed. The downside of the Paramount decision was that, from January 1995 until over-the-air digital multicasting became viable in the first half of the 2000s, it left most or all UPN programming unavailable in some mid-sized and most smaller markets where the network was not able, at least initially, to gain even secondary affiliate clearances. WWOR—although it technically never gave up its superstation status—ceased distributing a national cable feed on December 31, 1996, a move made by Advance Entertainment Corporation (which assumed ownership of corporate cousin Eastern Microwave Inc. and its satellite distribution rights to WWOR and WSBK-TV earlier in 1996) to avoid having to pay an increased royalty fee for the first six months of 1997 that the Copyright Royalty Tribunal instituted on January 1, 1997. To the consternation of many cable systems because of how it