After having shuttered two ON TV operations in markets with combative station owners and high cable penetration—Dallas–Fort Worth and Phoenix—Oak moved to sell its station in the Miami market in 1984 to John Blair & Co., which planned Spanish-language programming. Oak intended to get out of Los Angeles next. In August—after a year of speculation—it emerged that Oak was in talks to sell the Los Angeles system to SelecTV, which had competed alongside ON TV for six years in the Southern California market. A deal was initially reached, then collapsed. However, SelecTV ultimately acquired the Los Angeles operation, by then with just 156,000 subscribers, in February 1985. KVEA The same month that Oak sold the ON TV subscriber base to SelecTV, the company reached a deal to sell KBSC-TV itself to an investor group, Estrella Communications, headed by former Brazilian television network head Joe Wallach, in a $30 million transaction. SelecTV programming aired for a time on KBSC while the new owners readied the station's next chapter. On November 24, 1985, KVEA debuted. The new Spanish-language station sought to be an alternative to KMEX, the dominant outlet in southern California, with a wider range of U.S. and Latin American shows than KMEX's mostly Mexican fare and children's programming, as well as local news and a newsmagazine program. The creation of a second Spanish-language network had first been mooted in 1984. NetSpan's founding affiliates were WNJU in New York, ethnic independent KSCI-TV channel 18 for the Los Angeles market, and Chicago's WBBS-TV. By 1986, KVEA had replaced KSCI (and WCIU-TV had entered in Chicago); the network offered three hours a day of programming plus specials. Estrella Communications was a subsidiary of Reliance Capital Group, led by corporate raider Saul Steinberg. Less than a year after starting up KVEA, Reliance acquired John Blair & Co., which agreed to be purchased for $300 million to avoid a hostile takeover. The deal united KVEA with WSCV—the Miami-area station Oak had sold off two years prior—and WKAQ-TV in San Juan, Puerto Rico. In October 1986, Reliance then bought WNJU. On January 12, 1987, NetSpan became Telemundo, supplying additional programming and national news, which helped the station attract national advertisers. The investment in KVEA quickly paid off. By February 1987, the 15-month-old operation had achieved a 34 percent share of the Spanish-speaking audience in Los Angeles, with the market having grown large enough that KMEX did