Control4's partnership with Comcast is based on set-top boxes and DVRs, “not necessarily” the Xfinity Home platform, said the home control company's CEO. Martin Plaehn on his company’s earnings call Thursday said Comcast’s role providing content delivery and an internet pipeline to the home is “an enormous business driving most everything there.” The "intersection with our business is meaningful," he said. On Amazon’s Alexa and connected homes, Plaehn said more than 10,000 Control4 customers use Alexa daily for home automation experiences and usage is growing "consistently."

TDS Broadband agreed to acquire Crestview Cable in Oregon, TDS said in a Friday news release: The deal adds 21,000 service addresses to the adjacent BendBroadband system acquired by TDS in 2014. The companies need FCC approval of cable TV relay service license assignment, local franchise authority approvals and other consents, a TDS spokeswoman said. They expect to get all OKs by Oct. 7 and close in early Q4, she said.

National Amusements, controlling shareholder of CBS and Viacom, should force a merger of the two, BTIG analyst Rich Greenfield wrote Friday. NA seemingly has no intentions of selling either, and the scale and size of each is such that it's unlikely acquisitions could diversify them away from their legacy businesses and the challenges in the TV advertising and cable network subscription business, he said: Failed individual CBS and Viacom efforts at mergers and acquisitions like CBS-Starz and Viacom-Scripps (see 1707310062) might have gone better if CBS-Viacom were combined. BTIG said a CBS-Viacom brings cost savings from a unified TV and film studio, removes inefficiencies, better positions the combined company for direct-to-consumer business with Viacom producing not-for-linear TV content for CBS All Access, cuts the risk of carriage disputes, helps in the pursuit of other M&A in and outside of the legacy media sector, and would give more cash flow and scale to help pursue sports rights. NA -- which backed and then called off CBS-Viacom talks last year (see 1612120060) -- didn't comment.

A National Labor Relations Board determination that CNN and Team Video Services (TVS) were joint employers of technicians who then were laid off was faulty because the NLRB standard for making that determination was inconsistent with precedent and didn't explain why precedents don't govern, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit decided (in Pacer) Friday. The ruling by Judges Merrick Garland, Cornelia Pillard and Brett Kavanaugh and written by Garland included a Kavanaugh partial dissent. The majority opinion said the NLRB isn't barred from finding CNN a joint employer or using a different standard for determining joint-employer relationships, but the court can't enforce that. The D.C. Circuit granted CNN's cross-petition for reconsideration on labor law violations that flowed from the joint-employer finding, but it granted the board's application and denied the Time Warner unit's petition for review on violations not dependent on the joint-employer finding. Kavanaugh said NLRB failed on finding CNN a successor employer to TVS. Kavanaugh didn't see substantial evidence that CNN hiring decisions discriminated against former TVS workers. NLRB counsel didn't comment; CNN said it's reviewing the decision.

Murray Energy CEO Robert Murray's favorite hobby is suing or threatening litigation against people making political statements he dislikes, the ACLU of West Virginia said in an amicus brief (in Pacer) Wednesday in U.S. District Court in Wheeling, West Virginia. The brief -- on behalf of HBO, Time Warner and comedy talk show host John Oliver -- was in opposition to a Murray motion for a temporary restraining order and preliminary injunction. It also asked the court to issue an order to show cause why the case shouldn't be dismissed. The snark-filled brief called the case "beyond meritless" and at one point puts a picture of Murray alongside a photo of the Austin Powers franchise character Dr. Evil and says, in response to the defamation claim that Oliver compared Murray to "a geriatric Dr. Evil," that "truth is an absolute defense." The restraining order motion (in Pacer), filed in June, sought to bar the defendants from rebroadcasting the defamatory statements subject to the Murray lawsuit and publicly discussing the substance of the litigation. The Murray plaintiffs said that after suing in June, Robert Murray, his family and employees "have been inundated" with threats and harassment and that continued publication and public access to the defamatory statements "will only enlist additional people to Defendants’ perverse 'call to action,' with additional grave consequences." Murray outside counsel didn't comment.

Discovery Communications, in a joint venture with TEN: The Enthusiast Network (TEN), is creating an automobile content-centric TEN that combines Discovery's Velocity automotive network with TEN's automotive digital, direct-to-consumer, social and live event content, as well as TEN's Motor Trend YouTube channel and over-the-top service, Discovery said in a news release Thursday. Discovery said it will have majority control of the venture and an option to acquire 100 percent. TEN's print business won't be part of the joint venture, though the agreement will allow cross-promotion, Discovery said. The deal will see Velocity content added to TEN's Motor Trend OnDemand subscription VOD service, making it Discovery's first direct-to-consumer push, the company said. It said Discovery Chief Commercial Officer Paul Guyardo will be CEO and chairman of the joint venture, with TEN President Scott Dickey and Bob Scanlon, who will be president of Velocity and TEN Video Content, reporting to him.

Edge providers routinely engage in behaviors, like discriminating against content and throttling, that they complain are "destroying the Internet" if done by an ISP, telecom consultant Jonathan Lee blogged Wednesday. He said the argument that ISPs want a cable TV-like internet, with access to collections of sites offered like subscriptions to cable channel packages, lacks explanation of how ISPs could offer such a service or profit from it. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit's May en banc decision in USTelecom v. FCC (see 1705010038) said ISPs can offer curated service under Communications Act Title II regulation, but no ISP has gone that route, he said.

Pay-TV set-top box customers saved $941 million in energy costs in 2016 as a result of the industry's 2012 voluntary energy-efficiency agreement for the devices, said an annual report on the agreement released Wednesday by independent auditor D+R International. Annual energy consumption of set-tops declined 23.4 percent between 2012 and 2016, the report said. During the four years in which the agreement has been in place, consumers have saved about $2.1 billion on the energy bills and spared the U.S. 11.8 million metric tons of carbon emissions, it said. “The cumulative energy saved during this period” equals the total energy used by all the homes in Washington and Chicago combined for one year, “or the equivalent of removing the carbon emissions caused by nearly 2.5 million passenger cars for a full year,” it said.

The FCC 2016 order approving Charter Communications' buys of Time Warner Cable and Bright House Networks apparently contains a scrivener's error on who is to do an annual report about Charter compliance with the settlement-free interconnection condition, the buyer said in a docket 16-197 filing Tuesday. The order says the company is to submit a report from the independent compliance officer (ICO), but it surely meant from the company compliance officer, Charter said, since it wouldn't make sense for the company being monitored to submit a report to the FCC from the ICO since all other ICO reports are submitted directly to the agency. The condition as worded also makes Charter reporting on its interconnection compliance incomplete and is inconsistent with all other conditions, the company said. Charter said unless the FCC says otherwise, it will file a report from the company compliance officer and the ICO will submit a compliance report 60 days afterward.

Wisconsin man Cory Groshek, in suing Time Warner Cable and another prospective employer for Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA) violations for running credit checks on him, is alleging a statutory violation totally removed from concrete harm or appreciable risk of it, the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said in an opinion (in Pacer) issued Tuesday. The decision by Judges William Bauer, Ann Claire Williams and Jon DeGuilio and written by Bauer said Congress in the FCRA wasn't trying to protect job applicants from inadequate disclosures that credit checks might be run but to decrease the risk job applicants unknowingly would consent to when letting prospective employers get a credit report. The judges, upholding a lower court's dismissal of the original separate suits filed against TWC and Great Lakes Higher Education Corp., also said that Groshek's signing the disclosure and authorization negates his argument he suffered a privacy injury. They said the 9th Circuit's Syed v. M-I decision earlier this year, which came up in oral argument and in supplemental briefings, was inappropriate because Syed had factual allegations from which the court could infer harm, unlike Groshek. Counsel for Groshek didn't comment.