 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).CBS, then run by the cost-cutting Laurence Tisch, had reportedly bid only $290 million to retain the rights to the NFC television package and was unwilling to even approach the price of the Fox offer, which exceeded the bid made by CBS by $1.29 billion (or more than $100 million per year).At the time of Fox's bid, some of its owned-and-operated stations (except those in New York City, Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., and Salt Lake City) and most of its affiliates (except those in San Francisco, Seattle, Las Vegas, and Miami) were UHF stations that transmitted at a lower radiated power than its VHF counterparts.