Heritage Media announced in September 1995 that it would sell KEVN-TV and KIVV-TV to Blackstar, LLC, a minority-controlled company in which nonvoting equity interests were held by Fox Television Stations and Silver King Communications, for $14 million; the deal was completed on February 7, 1996. Blackstar immediately announced that KEVN would become a Fox affiliate; the affiliation change happened in July 1996. Prior to this, Fox programming was seen in the market primarily via cable carriage of Denver superstation KDVR or the national Foxnet service (which launched in 1991), while KOTA-TV had a secondary affiliation with Fox since 1994 to carry the network's coverage of the National Football League. Shortly after the affiliation switch was announced, Rapid City Broadcasting Company began construction of a replacement over-the-air NBC affiliate for the Black Hills region, but the affiliate would not launch until the spring of 1998, when KNBN-LP (now KWBH-LP, channel 27) began broadcasting; this station was not made widely available in the market until it was upgraded to full-power KNBN (channel 21) in May 2000. After KEVN affiliated with Fox and before KNBN-LP became a full-power station, Rapid signed an agreement with most cable television systems across southwestern South Dakota to import a cable-only version of NBC's Denver affiliate, KUSA-TV (which replaced KCNC-TV as the network's Denver outlet due to a November 1994 ownership deal between the joint venture of CBS and Westinghouse Broadcasting and NBC), with certain programs airing on other stations being replaced due to syndication exclusivity rules. Some areas of northwestern South Dakota (which is part of the Bismarck–Minot television market) received the network's programming via Dickinson affiliate KQCD-TV, while North Platte affiliate KNOP-TV would serve some parts of western Nebraska, and then-Casper affiliate KTWO-TV (which would affiliate with ABC in 2004) served northeastern Wyoming.