Company in 1977. In March 1983, A. H. Belo Corporation announced its intention to acquire the station; no formal sale agreement was reached, and by May the deal was off (Belo would go on to acquire WWL-TV in 1994 and WUPL in 2007). WVUE started broadcasting 24 hours a day in June 1986, becoming the last commercial television station in New Orleans to transition to a round-the-clock schedule. When Gaylord Broadcasting began a gradual paring down of its station group in 1987 (which would not be completed until 1999), WVUE was sold to the Burnham Broadcasting Company. Fox affiliation On December 18, 1993, the Fox Broadcasting Company outbid CBS for the rights to the NFL's National Football Conference television package. In March 1994, Fox partnered with minority-owned communications firm Savoy Pictures (which would serve as majority partner) to form SF Broadcasting. On August 25, 1994, the company bought WVUE, WALA-TV in Mobile, Alabama, and KHON-TV in Honolulu, Hawaii, for $229 million; fellow sister station WLUK-TV in Green Bay, Wisconsin, was sold to the company one month earlier in a separate $38 million deal, which for a time, was challenged by an FCC petition filed by NBC alleging that the deal violated foreign investment limits for U.S. broadcasters (the only Burnham station exempted from the deal was KBAK-TV in Bakersfield, California, which was spun off to Westwind Communications, a company founded by several former Burnham executives). As part of the deal, Fox signed a long-term agreement, in which the network would affiliate with SF's four "Big Three" network affiliates, beginning in the fall of 1995. Fox originally planned to own a minority voting stock in SF Broadcasting; however, in 1995, Fox opted against holding a voting interest (which would have resulted in the stations being counted against the FCC's station ownership total), although it would retain an ownership stake. The transaction was completed in the summer of 1995. WVUE-TV affiliated with Fox on January 1, 1996, ending its 43-year affiliation with ABC, which moved to WGNO (channel 26); New Orleans's original Fox affiliate, WNOL-TV (channel 38), took WGNO's former WB affiliation (that network had been affiliated with WGNO for just shy of a year prior to the switch, due to that station's owner, Tribune Broadcasting's partial ownership interest in The WB). Of the former Burnham stations that switched to Fox, WVUE was the only one involved in the deal that was