Fox Family Worldwide after it acquired International Family Entertainment—owner of the cable network The Family Channel, seeking a cable outlet for the Fox Kids programs to compete with services such as Cartoon Network (owned by Time Warner) and Nickelodeon (owned by Viacom). In 1998, Fox bought out its affiliates' interest in Fox Kids as part of a deal to help pay for the network's NFL package. The Fox Kids weekday block was reduced to two hours, and in an effort to help its affiliates comply with the recently implemented educational programming mandates defined by the Children's Television Act, reruns of former PBS series The Magic School Bus were added to the lineup. In 2000, affiliates were given the option of pushing the block up one hour to air from 2:00 PM to 4:00 PM rather than 3:00 PM to 5:00 PM In the six or so markets where a Fox affiliate carried Fox Kids and carried an early evening newscast at 5:00 PM (such as St. Louis and New Orleans), the station was already running the block an hour early by 1996. Some affiliates (such as WLUK-TV) would tape delay the block to air between 10:00 AM and 1:00 PM, one of the lowest-rated time periods on U.S. television (and when virtually all children 5 years of age and older are at school). A few only aired The Magic School Bus in this sort of graveyard slot as an act of malicious compliance with the Children's Television Act. Fox Kids fought vehemently against the E/I rule during its development. End of Fox Kids By 2001, members of the Fox affiliate board had felt they were on much more even footing with the "Big Three" networks and wanted to take back the time allocated to the Fox Kids programming blocks to air their own programming. Saturday mornings, long the only province of children's programming, had become a liability as the other networks started to extend their weekday morning news programs to weekends. Fox Kids, which had been the top-rated children's program block among the major networks since 1992, had been overtaken in the ratings by ABC's One Saturday Morning block in 1997, then by Kids' WB a year later with the stronger animation block backed by Warner Bros. that included shows such as Pokémon and Yu-Gi-Oh!. ABC and UPN aired mostly comedy-based cartoons at this time, with the exception of live-action