co-parent Viacom) reached an agreement to purchase KTLC from the Oklahoma Educational Television Authority for $23.5 million. OETA planned to use the proceeds from the sale to Paramount—which was made possible because OETA maintained the commercial classification of the channel 43 broadcast license after the Heritage Media donation—to fund the construction and sign-on of the digital broadcast transmitters of KETA-TV and its repeaters, which the network was mandated to complete by December 2003 under an FCC directive to public television stations. KOCB became the Oklahoma City affiliate of The WB on January 18, 1998; from the network's January 1995 launch until the switch, The WB had been available in the market through the superstation feed of the network's Chicago affiliate, WGN-TV (which was carried on Cox Communications, Multimedia Cablevision, and other local cable and satellite providers). While the switch gave The WB an over-the-air presence in the Oklahoma City market, it consequently resulted in many area residents that did not have either an outdoor antenna that could receive UPN affiliates from Tulsa (KTFO-TV [now MyNetworkTV affiliate KMYT-TV) or Sulphur (KOKT-LP, now defunct) or a subscription to satellite provider Dish Network (which carried New York City owned-and-operated station WWOR-TV [now MyNetworkTV owned-and-operated station] as a default UPN feed) being unable to view UPN programs within the market for the next six months. Paramount took over the operations of channel 43 on June 15, 1998, 3½ weeks before the purchase formally received FCC approval on July 8. The station—which also adopted the callsign KPSG, in reference to its new owner (which had earlier applied the base "PSG" call letters on channel 43's new Philadelphia sister station, WPSG [now a CW owned-and-operated station])—reverted into a general entertainment outlet as the market's new UPN affiliate at 5:00 a.m. on June 20. The conversion was originally scheduled to occur on June 1, but was twice postponed—first until June 13, then to June 15 and finally to June 20—because of technical difficulties and delays in finalizing the sale to Paramount (the issues leading to the second postponement were unrelated to a tornado outbreak that hit central Oklahoma on the evening of the 13th). Through Viacom's ownership stake in UPN, channel 43 became the first television station in Oklahoma to serve as an owned-and-operated station of a major commercial broadcast network (preceding the conversion of KOPX-TV [channel 62] and its Tulsa sister, KTPX-TV, into charter O&Os of