There are three PBS member stations serving the Philadelphia market. WHYY serves Philadelphia and the Delaware Valley, primarily. WLVT Allentown serves the northern tier, primarily Lehigh Valley, and the slew of "NJTV" branded stations serve the state of New Jersey.
If any of these stations agree to carry PBS Kids, we'll have an affiliate in our market that can be distributed across area cable systems.
Here's the way I see it. The least likely of the stations to carry the network is "NJTV" since their stations cross markets. They have also yet to carry any other secondary public television network.
You could argue that there'd likely be a better chance that it would be picked up by WLVT. In several ways, the pickup makes sense. It could replace the outgoing V-Me network. It could also be placed on the blank "39-2." That all doesn't matter if Lehigh Valley Public Telecommunications says "no thank you" anyway.
As for WHYY, there's plenty of room to fit the new network. In other words, there's plenty of bandwidth for a "12-4." I doubt they'd want to replace their local outlet, branded "Y2" for PBS Kids, and the PBS World network isn't going anywhere.
It's not exactly a good sign that many public television station/group owners are heavily promoting the net, and it's debut. They've been doing so since the middle of December. Since we're not hearing a peep from WLVT or WHYY, it's most likely that the market won't be able to watch PBS Kids on January 16th. At this point, if either are deciding to carry the net, it won't be able to make it for the 16th.
The only nearby market that definitively signed-on for PBS Kids is WVIA Scranton. It looks like I'll have to adjust to make sure they come in well on the 16th. Unfortunately, it looks like you may be out of luck for the debut.