News 55 Long Island, began with the station, with just three full-time staff and two camera crews. During its first year of operations, WLIG employed a number of gimmicks to attract viewers, such as a "Watch and Win Sweepstakes" in which viewers were shown a "code word" on-screen during a particular show and had to send in a postcard with that word for the chance to win a prize and offering 100,000 free loop antennas to non-cable viewers who could not receive the station clearly. The efforts paid off, as WLIG gradually became a solid ratings player. By June 1987, WLIG was estimated to reach 200,000 viewers and was carried on eight of nine cable television providers on Long Island. The lone exception was Cablevision, the largest provider on Long Island, which claimed that WLIG added nothing to the service they already offered, and therefore refused to carry it. A cable subscriber advocacy group, New Yorkers for Fair Cable, claimed that the real reason was that WLIG competed with services that Cablevision owned and offered, specifically News 12 Long Island. In October 1987, BQ Cable Company (later part of Time Warner Cable, now Charter Spectrum) began offering WLIG to subscribers in Brooklyn and Queens. During its early years, WLIG relied heavily on old movies and reruns of classic television shows and positioned itself as a station offering family-friendly entertainment consistent with the philosophy of its founder, a devout Roman Catholic. Because of Pascucci's relationship with TeLIcare, a cable network run by the Roman Catholic Diocese of Rockville Centre, the station aired some of their locally produced shows. It also featured a daily newscast at 10 p.m. and other local programming, such as a political talk show, Focus on Long Island, sports programming and some first-run syndicated programming rounded out the broadcast schedule. Pascucci entered into a deal to sell WLIG to First Century Broadcasting, a consortium headed by Ronn Haus, in 1988; Haus's Coast to Coast syndicated religious program aired on WLIG. In announcing the transaction, Pascucci acknowledged the station had made a loss since its construction, though he noted he would continue to operate channel 55 and characterized the transaction as a method of raising capital. The deal then fell through; as a consequence, WLIG dropped its local news broadcasts in April 1989. It fired all but one of its news staff, who was kept on to anchor a