 Six years after Fox's first attempt to acquire the rights had foundered, the NFL opened up negotiations for the television contracts to both of its conferences as well as for the Sunday and Monday prime time football packages.Fox decided to submit another bid to the NFL, this time, making a more aggressive move to successfully secure a contract with the league, on the acknowledgment that it would likely need to bid a considerably higher amount than the incumbent networks that were seeking to renew or expand upon their existing NFL television rights would elect to offer in order to acquire a piece of the package.On December 17, 1993, Fox stunned the sports and television worlds by reaching a four-year, $1.58 billion contract with the NFL effective with the 1994 season to televise regular season and playoff games involving teams in the National Football Conference – a package that had been owned by CBS since 1956, fourteen years prior to the merger of the NFL and the American Football League (AFL) that resulted in the teams that composed the two leagues respectively being divided between the NFC and the American Football Conference (AFC) – as well as Super Bowl XXXI (which was to be held in January 1997).