viewing area the option of watching the affected shows on the Fox Now streaming platforms or its cable/satellite video-on-demand service the day after their initial airing. The only two notable program preemptions that KTVI made as a Fox affiliate—outside of those necessitated by extended breaking news or severe weather coverage, special programming, or other scheduling conflicts—have been the brief one of the Fox Kids block and that of the secondary Sunday morning NFL pre-game show Fox NFL Kickoff, of which KTVI had declined carriage for the 2015 regular season (the program moved to Fox from Fox Sports 1 in September 2015), with the station's second digital subchannel airing it instead in its network-recommended time slot; KTVI began clearing Fox NFL Kickoff in September 2016. Fox children's programming Unlike most of its sister stations under its former New World ownership, KTVI has carried Fox's children's programming. Upon joining the network in August 1995, it opted not to run the Fox Kids weekday afternoon and Saturday morning blocks, instead airing children's programs acquired via syndication on weekend mornings (the preemptions of Fox Kids by the New World stations led the network to change its carriage policies to allow Fox stations uninterested in carrying the block the right of first refusal to transfer the local rights to another station; by 2001, affiliates were no longer required to run the Fox Kids lineup even if Fox had not secured a substitute carrier). Fox Kids originally wanted to be broadcast locally on KPLR, but the offer was turned down by that station's then-owner Koplar Communications, because Koplar felt that "they had a strong slate of children's programming and no room for the Rangers". Fox Kids subsequenty went unseen in the market, and representatives of the block faced the possibility of piping in KSMO-TV in Kansas City (which aired Fox Kids because WDAF-TV declined carriage of the block) for cable subscribers until September, when Fox Kids arranged for its programming to be aired locally on religious independent KNLC. KNLC then drew the ire of the network by asking children to write to Missouri governor Mel Carnahan to protest the planned execution of Johnny Lee Wilson, then in prison for the 1986 murder of 79-year-old Aurora resident Pauline Martz (Carnahan pardoned Wilson that same month); additionally, KNLC's poor signal—both over the air and on cable—angered members of the largest Fox Kids Club in the nation. As a