Shares of Liberty Expedia Holdings are expected to begin trading on a "when-issued basis" on Nasdaq starting Friday, after stockholders at a special meeting Tuesday approved a spin-off from Liberty Interactive, said the company in a news release. Liberty Interactive, which owns QVC and has other video and digital commerce interests, said it expects Liberty Expedia's Series A and Series B common stock to begin trading "in the regular way" under symbols "LEXEA" and "LEXEB" beginning Monday.

Petitions by public interest groups Free Press, Credo Action and Demand Progress netted more than 115,000 signatures in opposition to AT&T's buying Time Warner, Demand Progress said in a news release Wednesday. All three petitions -- here, here and here -- ask policymakers to stop the transaction because of the concentration of economic and political power that would result and the lack of consumer benefit. DOJ suing AT&T's DirecTV over another issue Wednesday became another thorn in the side of the telco buying TW (see 1611020034). Some on Capitol Hill remain concerned (see 1611020036).

Discovery Communications and Major League Baseball subsidiary BAMTech are jointly forming BAMTech Europe, a company providing digital services to content owners, broadcasters and over-the-top platforms in Europe, they said in a news release Tuesday. BAMTech Europe's first client is Eurosport Digital, which will get access to various European sports rights from worldwide sports properties, including current and future rights acquired by BAMTech and jointly by Eurosport and BAMTech, the two said. The deal is BAMTech's first move into Europe, and BAMTech’s back-end video platform and services will be implemented in 2017 across Eurosport Digital’s products, such as Eurosport.com and subscription-based OTT platform Eurosport Player, they said. The two companies also said they will collaboratively work on making premium sports events more widely available through streaming, including via current and future rights acquired by BAMTech and joint acquisitions. Disney also is working with BAMTech on its ESPN streaming service (see 1609220053), and it bought a third of the company for $1 billion (see 1608100024).

Singapore online platform YuuZoo is buying 33.3 percent of movie studio/entertainment group Relativity Media, with an option to buy a majority over the next 24 months, YuuZoo said in a news release Sunday. The deal marries its distribution platform -- which covers 69 nations and includes such partners as Alibaba subsidiary Alisports and African TV network NTA -- to Relativity Media's library of content, it said.

Time Warner Cable's (TWC) assertion that there was a collective bargaining agreement (CBA) with the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, AFL-CIO, Local Union No. 3 at the time of an alleged contractual breach ignores that the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) definitively ruled the opposite, the union said in a reply brief (in Pacer) Friday in the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. The union said it doesn't dispute that through most of the arbitration process it also mistakenly believed there was a CBA with TWC, but TWC "is attempting an end run" around the statutory procedure for appealing the NLRB decision. And since TWC never asked for review of the NLRB decision by the appellate court, the court doesn't have jurisdiction to rule on the validity of that decision, the union said. Local 3 said it also isn't clear the arbitrator who awarded damages to TWC had authority to do so given a NLRB decision that no CBA was in place, and it isn't clear how expired contractual terms like a no-strike provision can survive the expiration of a CBA. Local 3 is appealing a U.S. District Court in Brooklyn ruling upholding those arbitrator awards, and the company is cross-appealing the portion of the Brooklyn court's judgment that denied confirmation of part of a 2015 final arbitration award ordering the union to refrain from further violations (see 1608300029). TWC, now owned by Charter Communications, didn't comment.

Even if force majeure provisions in Charter Communications service agreements indemnify it from liability for not providing service during weather-related outages or crediting or refunding customers, those provisions don't have any bearing on a class-certification analysis, a group of Charter customers in Massachusetts suing the company over a 2011 snowstorm-related service interruption said in a reply memorandum (in Pacer) Thursday in U.S. District Court in Springfield, Massachusetts. Charter, in a motion (in Pacer) filed this month opposing the plaintiffs seeking class certification, said the class-certification motion wrongly asserts Charter's storm restoration monitoring systems could compute automatic refunds for force majeure service interruptions, but Charter can't create records that quantify the length of time customers suffer cable TV outages. It also said the plaintiffs' motion that Charter doesn't adequately disclose its refund policy "ignores ... that few if any proposed class members were conceivably injured." Without any identified actual injury, no plaintiff is eligible to represent the proposed class in a refund policy disclosure claim, Charter said, saying the proposed class definition is "impermissibly overbroad" by also covering Internet and phone service outages. The company also said it regularly gives storm-related refunds on request, and any customer who got such a courtesy refund would need to be excluded. The plaintiffs, in their reply, said they were in fact injured by not getting the credits or refunds to which they were entitled. They also dismissed the "overbroad" argument and said any customers who already received refunds would represent, at most, de minimis numbers.

The FCC should consider a proposed set-top box order “in a fully transparent manner,” the AFL-CIO said in a letter to Chairman Tom Wheeler Wednesday. The agency should “publicly release the full text of its revised set-top box proposal so that stakeholders, including consumers and working people in the affected industries, can provide informed feedback to the Commission,” the letter said. The original NPRM would “upend the current content delivery system” and could lead to “fewer resources to invest in quality programming, the network, and the people who create and produce content and who build, maintain, and service the networks,” the union said: The complexity of the industry and the diversity of Americans affected by set-tops is extensive. Allowing stakeholders to review and comment on the complete text of the revised order “is the only way to ensure that such concerns are addressed,” the organization said. “The middle class Americans who depend on copyright protections to earn family-supporting pay and the consumers entrusting their personal information with corporations that deliver their entertainment content deserve a voice in the process.”

The FCC should refrain from adopting any regulation on the provision of broadband Internet access services in the context of the set-top box proceeding, said NTCA in a meeting with aides to Chairman Tom Wheeler Tuesday, according to an ex parte filing in docket 16-42. “The mere fact that an ISP might happen also to be a multichannel video programming distributor does not enable the use of Section 629 to regulate equipment and facilities not actually used in video programming distribution,” NTCA said. Nothing in the congressional directives on regulating the retail set-top market gives the FCC authority to regulate the facilities of an ISP, NTCA said.

Rovi patent infringement complaints against Comcast and Arris are moving from federal court in Texas to Manhattan. In an order Tuesday, U.S. Magistrate Judge Roy Payne of Marshall, Texas, approved motions by Comcast and Arris for a change of venue. In his order, Payne cited the forum-selection clauses that were part of the 2004 agreements between Rovi and Comcast for creating a joint venture to develop interactive program guides and the cable operator's 2016 lawsuit against Rovi in U.S. District Court in Manhattan, alleging Rovi's institution of patent infringement and International Trade Commission enforcement actions were a breach of their patent and license agreements. The judge also rejected Rovi's arguments that the technology and conduct in the patent infringement suits aren't covered by the software agreement that includes forum-selection language. Payne said he agreed with Rovi that Arris hasn't raised a nonfrivolous defense to patent infringement, but all of Rovi's infringement actions are being transferred to U.S. District Court in Manhattan. That's because of the Comcast/Rovi software agreement requiring the plaintiff to litigate the Comcast dispute there, and some infringement claims are based on divided or indirect infringement that involves defendants other than the operator. Rovi didn't comment Wednesday.

Charter Communications' bid to have a lawsuit alleging racially based discrimination in its program carriage decisions tossed was rejected. In a ruling (in Pacer) entered Tuesday U.S. District Court in Los Angeles, Judge George Wu said when there are two plausible explanations for behavior, one put by the defendant and the other the plaintiff, a compliant can be dismissed only when the defendant's explanation makes the plaintiff's implausible. He said his ruling was based on the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals' Eclectic Properties East v. Marcus & Millichap. Charter argued it had valid business reasons for not carrying Entertainment Studios Network (ESN) content (see 1606170001). Wu also said the ESN arguments, when viewed in total, validly state a claim and it's entitled to proceed on discovery. But Wu upheld Charter's move to dismiss the co-plaintiff National Association of African American Owned Media for lack of standing, agreeing with the cable operator that if ESN is NAAAOM's sole member, NAAAOM participation is unnecessary. Charter in a statement Wednesday said the suit "is a desperate tactic that this programmer has used before with other distributors." A similar ESN/NAAAOM complaint against Comcast was tossed out earlier this month (see 1610060002).