The WB 100+ Station Group (originally called The WeB from its developmental stages until March 1999) was a national programming service of The WB—owned by the Warner Bros. Entertainment division of Time Warner, the Tribune Company, and group founder and longtime WB network president Jamie Kellner—intended primarily for American television markets ranked #100 and above by Nielsen Media Research estimates. Operating from September 21, 1998 to September 17, 2006, The WB 100+ comprised an affiliate group that was initially made exclusively of individually branded cable television channels serving areas that lacked availability for a locally based WB broadcast affiliate and supplied a nationalized subfeed consisting of WB network and syndicated programs; in the network's waning years, the WB 100+ group began maintaining primary affiliations on full-power and low-power stations in certain markets serviced by the feed.
The WB 100+ Station Group was also essentially structured as a de facto national feed of The WB, and maintained a master schedule of syndicated and brokered programs for broadcast on all affiliates of the feed outside of time periods designated for The WB's prime time, daytime and Saturday morning programming. Programming and promotional services for The WB 100+ were housed at The WB's corporate headquarters in Burbank, California; engineering and master control operations were based at the California Video Center in Los Angeles.
History
Pre-launch
The history of The WB 100+ can be traced back to a charter affiliation agreement reached on December 3, 1993, between The WB and Tribune Broadcasting (whose corporate parent, the Tribune Company (later Tribune Media), held minority ownership in the network), which resulted in Tribune's Chicago television flagship WGN-TV carrying The WB's prime time programming (the Kids' WB block – which debuted in September 1995, eight months after The WB's launch – would air instead on independent station WCIU-TV before moving to WGN-TV in September 2004).
Through that deal, WGN's national superstation feed (later separately branded as WGN America and operating as a conventional basic cable channel) would act as a default WB affiliate for select markets where the network would have difficulty securing an affiliation with a broadcast television station at The WB's launch on January 11, 1995 (either due to the lack of available over-the-air stations or the absence of a secondary affiliation with an existing station within the market). This arrangement was conceived to give the network enough time to find affiliates in those "white areas" (a term referring to areas in which a national broadcaster does not have market clearance), allowing the WGN superstation feed to nationally distribute The WB's programming to a broader audience than would be possible without such an agreement in the interim. Some cable providers also carried either KTLA (for areas in the Pacific Time Zone) or WPIX (for areas in the Eastern Time Zone) depending on the location in addition to or in lieu of WGN's national feed.
Development and launch
Jamie Kellner – co-founder, and original president of The WB – conceived the concept of a cable-originated programming service that would serve smaller markets, originally titled The WeB, in June 1996; the network formally presented its concept for the service, which would function similarly to the reasoning behind the agreement with the WGN superstation feed, to cable providers on September 24 of that year. Kellner had previous experience in developing such a service; during his tenure as Fox's original network president from 1986 to 1993, Kellner developed a similar (but less localized) service, Foxnet, a cable channel owned by News Corporation (the corporate parent of Fox at the time) that operated from June 1991 to September 2006, and was the first cable channel that designed to distribute a broadcast network's programming directly to cable providers in smaller markets where the network could not maintain an exclusive affiliation due to the limited number of available commercial television stations. After Russell Myerson (who would serve as the group's executive vice president and general manager) joined The WB in 1997, Kellner came to Myerson with his idea for a national cable feed of the network that would distribute WB programming to these "white area" markets with five or fewer commercial stations (including some markets where UPN, which debuted five days after The WB launched, managed to obtain an affiliation).