Television") to avoid confusion with WPVI-TV in Philadelphia, and construction was under way on the downtown Wilmington studios and the transmitter site in South Harrison Township, New Jersey. A keystone of the station's new programming was to be a series of 75 Philadelphia Big 5 basketball games. However, the second selection of a call sign drew the ire of WBOC-TV in Salisbury, Maryland; the two signals would overlap around Dover. WBOC-TV alleged confusion would result from the launch of WBOT-TV and that it had received telephone calls intended to reach the Wilmington outlet. WBOC-TV won a lawsuit against Delaware Valley Broadcasters in Delaware Chancery Court, resulting in a call sign change to WTGI-TV. No matter its name, channel 61 was confronted with months of construction delays. The basketball season came and went, and so too did several start dates, including the end of 1985 and April. However, WTGI-TV finally debuted on July 9, 1986, giving Delaware its first commercial television station since WVUE folded in 1958. The station's programming mostly consisted of syndicated reruns, as well as local news inserts into Independent Network News; and Focus Delaware, a public affairs program. However, also present at WTGI-TV's much-delayed launch were the ingredients for its near-immediate failure. Principal among these was the fact that must carry laws that once required local cable systems to carry local TV stations such as WTGI-TV had been overturned in 1985. Rollins Cablevision, the incumbent cable system in Wilmington, did not carry the station at launch and had no plans to do so; when WTGI-TV asked the city for assistance, it was deep into a two-year-long contract negotiation with Rollins. This limited the station's viewer and advertiser base. In addition, the station's attempt to be Philadelphia's third independent was dashed by the relaunch of WGBS-TV the year before. Further, the delayed launch exhausted much of the investors' working capital; it had cost $6 million to put WTGI-TV on the air. By late October, the station was courting investors. Home shopping and ethnic programming On November 24, 1986, less than five months after going on the air, WTGI-TV dropped most of its existing programming inventory to air ShoppingLine, a home shopping service. The change in format left only a handful of programs from the original slate, including Focus Delaware and a block of religious programs on Sunday mornings. ShoppingLine went out of business in February 1987, forcing WTGI-TV