Shelly Cooper will never forget the day he learned WGN's signal had been put up on satellite. It was Nov. 8, 1978 and Cooper, then the station's general manager, was in a hotel conference room in Arizona, carrying out his duties as chairman of the Association of Independent Television Stations.

Despite the sunny clime and their posh surroundings, Cooper's board members were in an uproar. "We were meeting about this problem of superstations," he recalls. Ever since Ted Turner, who was one of the association's members, had put his Atlanta independent up on satellite in 1976, the industry had buzzed with predictions that more superstations would spring up. For most independents, there were few things scarier than the thought of big market stations, with their rich array of programming, being piped in on a local cable system. Worst of all, stations had no control over whether their signals would be put up on satellite. Cable operators could simply pick them out of the sky, without having to pay for them or even get a broadcaster's permission.

As Cooper sat listening to his distressed colleagues, word came that he had a phone call, so he excused himself and left the room. On the other end of the line was one of his lieutenants in Chicago, who gave him some surprising news. "A little company called United Video, out of Tulsa Oklahoma, had picked up our signal and was selling it to cable operators," Cooper recalls.

Returning to the conference room, an embarrassed Cooper told his colleagues what had happened. More mayhem ensued, but Cooper remembers not feeling completely …