On November 24, 1986, less than five months after going on the air, WTGI-TV dropped most of its existing programming inventory to air ShoppingLine, a home shopping service.[18] The change in format left only a handful of programs from the original slate, including Focus Delaware and a block of religious programs on Sunday mornings.[19] ShoppingLine went out of business in February 1987, forcing WTGI-TV to change to a new service, Consumer Discount Network.[20] That same month, Delaware Valley Broadcasters, Limited Partnership, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy reorganization.[21] Later that year, the station got something of a break when revisions to must-carry laws and a rebuild of the Wilmington cable system, sold to Heritage Cablevision, forced the company to add WTGI-TV to its lineup.[22] Consumers Discount Network, like ShoppingLine before it, went out of business at the end of 1987, and it was replaced by America's Value Network; the station also began to reduce the amount of home shopping programming on its schedule.[23]
The station's programming took another major turn beginning in February 1988. On February 29, it affiliated with Telemundo and began to recast itself as a multilingual station serving the Delaware Valley's ethnic communities, branding as "Philadelphia's International Channel". The new format, inspired by KSCI in the Los Angeles area, also gave the station an opportunity to appear on more cable systems, as its programming would not duplicate home shopping channels that already paid cable companies for carriage.[24] In addition to Spanish-language output from Telemundo, the reformatted WTGI-TV offered viewers programming in Italian, Korean, Czech, Portuguese, Greek, and Ukrainian, as well as specialty programming for the Jewish and Black communities.[25][26] In January 1989, WTGI removed the remaining home shopping programming from its schedule,[27] and later that year, it moved its offices to Philadelphia.[28] The station turned its first-ever profit in the fourth quarter of 1990.[29]
The bankruptcy court accepted an offer by National Minority TV, Inc. (NMTV) for WTGI-TV in March 1991. However, the attempted purchase became mired in issues as to the control and ownership of the company, which claimed to be owned by minorities. Of the three members of National Minority TV, two were minorities—and one was Paul Crouch, founder of the Trinity Broadcasting Network. In TBN's monthly Praise the Lord newsletter, Crouch announced that the station would be affiliated with TBN. The deal drew criticism from WTGI's employees, believing the loss of the station's existing programming would have a negative impact on the region. However, more significantly, questions about National Minority TV's ownership structure led to the FCC taking an interest in the case. A petition to deny was filed by one of the station's employees, and the commission responded by asking NMTV for more information about its principals; if the firm were not actually minority-owned, the purchase would be illegal for TBN to execute because it owned the then-maximum of 12 commercial TV stations, a limit that could only be surpassed by minority-controlled firms.[30] However, before the commission could act, NMTV withdrew its bid because the delays had made it impossible to meet deadlines imposed by the bankruptcy court.[31][32]
The passage of the Cable Television Consumer Protection and Competition Act of 1992 put must-carry rules back into place, with important impacts on WTGI. In late 1992, of the 1.8 million cable homes in the Philadelphia market, only 520,000 received the station, and attempts to increase that number were being met by "various degrees of coldness".[33] A year later, the station was promoting its addition to many cable systems as a result of the new law,[34] and it had begun production of a new local program, the health talk show Dr. Castillo y su Salud, to provide health advice to the Hispanic community.[35] Despite increased profitability, Delaware Valley Broadcasters filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection a second time in August 1993, per general manager Dan Slape, "to better meet our future goals and objectives".[36] As a result, the bankruptcy court ordered a sale of the station.[37] Even with a court-ordered sale looming, WTGI initiated production of a new public affairs series, Entérate (Find Out), in July.[38]
