of several Buffalo area stations seen in the southern portion of the Canadian province of Ontario, including Toronto, which is the station's largest target audience. On April 30, 2009, Shaw Broadcast Services and Shaw Direct stopped transmitting the WIVB-TV signal, replacing it with CBS-owned WWJ-TV in Detroit. WIVB-TV also served as the default CBS station for portions of Steuben County, New York, due to the absence of a local affiliate in the Elmira market; this lasted until 2009 when Elmira ABC affiliate WENY-TV launched a third digital subchannel (on DT2) that is affiliated with CBS. Spectrum reallocation On April 14, 2017, WIVB announced that it had sold its spectrum in the FCC's broadcast incentive auction and that it would no longer broadcast on UHF channel 39. The station's programming would be unaffected, as WIVB shares UHF channel 32 with sister station WNLO while holding a separate license; WIVB continues to remap to virtual channel 4.1. The change took effect April 16, 2018. Because WNLO's broadcast signal is centered further north than the former WIVB-TV tower that was in Colden, the move further deteriorated reception of the channel in the western Southern Tier, where it had already been marginalized after the first digital transition and move to UHF, while at the same time improving the station's coverage along the Golden Horseshoe in Ontario, including a city-grade signal in Toronto. To restore its Southern Tier coverage area, Nexstar reached an agreement to transfer channel 32 to WUTV, which has historically put a greater emphasis on its Canadian viewership than WIVB has; WIVB and WNLO would in turn receive the channel 36 allocation (being vacated by adjacent-market channels WENY-TV and CITS-DT) that WUTV had originally purchased, which will allow it to reposition its signal so that it again serves the Southern Tier. The realignment took effect on the day of the repack, August 1, 2019. Carriage disputes WIVB-TV has had significant contract disputes with both of the major cable television providers in the station's coverage area, Time Warner Cable (which covers most of Western New York) and Atlantic Broadband (which covers much of its Northern Pennsylvania area as well as the rest of the Western New York region). In both cases, WIVB-TV demanded a rights fee of 25 cents per month per subscriber (in addition to another 25 cents for sister station WNLO) and refused to allow the carriers the right to carry