filing of the license transfer with the FCC. Beasley retained the station, which dropped home shopping in 1991—when HSN cut its payments to affiliated stations—to air movies, older syndicated shows, and Baltimore Orioles games. The station's longstanding issue of cable carriage was resolved in 1992 when changes to federal regulations prompted Cablevision to put WYED on its basic lineup in Raleigh and Durham. (It did not appear on cable in Fayetteville until February 1995.) For the next two years, WYED continued with a slightly better schedule than it had. In addition, the station dabbled in local sports with the production of several high school football telecasts as well as a local children's show, Kam and Kids, whose producers would be sued by channel 17 for failure to pay for air time. Outlet and NBC ownership Beasley sold WYED in 1994 to Outlet Communications of Providence, Rhode Island, for $5.4 million. Outlet made major changes in programming, affiliated channel 17 with the new WB network, and changed the call letters to WNCN at the start of 1995. The call sign was permanent, but the affiliation was temporary: in November 1994, the station was announced as the new NBC affiliate for the Triangle beginning in the fall of 1995. Outlet had good relations with NBC. Its other two stations, WJAR in Providence and WCMH-TV in Columbus, Ohio, were affiliated with NBC, which was looking for an upgrade in the market. NBC had a long history of misery in the Triangle: it had been affiliated since 1971 with WRDC (channel 28), a perennial also-ran in local television that ceased producing local newscasts in 1991; prior to then, NBC had aired on WTVD (channel 11) in the 1960s, with some shows moving to channel 28 when it began broadcasting in 1968. WRDC picked up the UPN affiliation at launch and displaced two nights of NBC programming to air UPN fare; those two nights turned up on WNCN. As construction began to turn the former WLFL studios on Front Street into a new facility for channel 17 and on improvements to yield an increase in transmitter power, and the assembly of a news department began, so too would the ownership change: Outlet accepted a $396 million offer from NBC in August 1995. WNCN became the full-time NBC affiliate in the Raleigh–Durham market on September 10, 1995—a month earlier than planned, thanks to an agreement between