Trading began Thursday on Nasdaq and over the counter of Liberty Global's new tracking stock for its Caribbean and Latin American operations, the LiLAC Group. The company said in a news release Wednesday that the LiLAC Group stock was created to allow shareholders to invest directly in its cable business in Chile and its majority interest in a Puerto Rican cable company, Liberty Cablevision, which it and Searchlight Capital Partners bought in June.

The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reversed its own ruling that could have forced The Golf Channel to pay back more than $5.9 million in stolen money it received for its advertising. After deciding earlier this year that TGC failed to show it provided Stanford International Bank with ad services worth the money it received, TGC requested that the issue of interpreting the value of something given to a good faith transferee in the Ponzi scheme go to the Texas Supreme Court. Ralph Janvey, the court-appointed receiver of Stanford International Bank, sued TGC in 2011, trying to claw back the money given it by Stanford -- which was the focal point of what the 5th Circuit called an "undisputed ... multi-billion-dollar Ponzi scheme." While it operated, Stanford was the title sponsor of a PGA Tour event held yearly in Memphis, and subsequently bought ads on TGC. A federal judge in Dallas in 2013 tossed out Janvey's lawsuit on summary judgment -- a decision the 5th Circuit initially overturned in March. Tuesday, it vacated that decision and asked for clarification from the Texas Supreme Court regarding the Texas Uniform Fraudulent Transfer Act.

As of July 1, Cable One is separate from former parent Graham Holdings, Graham said in a news release that day. Under the spinoff, Graham shareholders receive a share of Cable One for each share of Graham Class A or Class B common stock they held. Cable One will trade on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker CABO.

The Justice Department asked the FCC to delay action on Altice's plan to buy a majority of Suddenlink. In a filing posted Tuesday in docket 15-135, DOJ's National Security Division said it was "reviewing these matters for any national security, law enforcement and public safety issue." That has been a standard step in other deals under FCC review. DOJ said it made the request with the concurrence of the Defense and Homeland Security departments.

GreenPeak Technologies unveiled a single-radio multiprotocol chipset with multichannel receive capability for set-top boxes, gateways and other IoT devices. The GP712 enables simultaneous listening for ZigBee and Thread packets using a single radio, said GreenPeak in a Tuesday news release.

Discovery Communications and its Eurosport sports network got all European broadcast rights for the four Olympic Games in 2018, 2020, 2022 and 2024 from the International Olympic Committee, Discovery said in a Monday news release. The rights, costing about $1.46 billion, include free-to-air and pay TV, Internet and mobile phone. Discovery agreed to air some coverage on free-to-air TV during the Games.

Pay-TV operators bought $15.3 billion worth of set-top boxes last year, a decline of $600 million, the first contraction in the STB market since 2002, said IHS Monday. Shipments of pay-TV STBs inched ahead nearly 1 percent during the period to 204.7 million units, but the modest shipment growth “failed to compensate for the effects of price erosion” in the competitive market, said IHS. Pay-TV STB vendors had a “great run” since 2002 on growth in pay TV, cable digitization mandates, DVRs, HDTV and IPTV, said Daniel Simmons, IHS head-connected home research. “The industry is now at an inflection point.” Mature pay-TV markets are saturated with “high-value, advanced boxes," setting up shipment declines there, while operators in emerging markets “aren’t transitioning to advanced boxes fast enough to increase overall industry value,” he said. Consolidations in the first half of the year foreshadowed a declining market, said IHS, with South Korean STB vendor Woojeon & Handan exiting the market and Swiss vendor Advanced Digital Broadcast delisted from the SIX Swiss Exchange. TiVo and U.K.-based Amino have acquired pay-TV software companies, while market leader Arris announced plans to acquire Pace, it said. IHS predicts the market will shrink further this year, to $15.1 billion, and will continue dropping to $13.2 billion in 2018 before stabilizing in 2019. Industry value will decline “across nearly all segments,” except for satellite pay-TV STBs, said IHS. Most satellite operators aren't ISPs, “so they cannot virtualize traditional STB functionality, such as DVR, into the cloud as readily,” said Simmons. Satellite operators will need to invest in STB hardware to enable advanced services that can compete with those offered by cable and IPTV operators, he said. Continued pay-TV growth in Africa and the Middle East, as well as in South and Central America, also will provide STB opportunities over the forecast period, said IHS.

Charter Communications was a frequent suitor for Time Warner Cable before Comcast seemingly trumped it, making acquisition offers three separate times between July 2013 and January 2014, and being rejected each time by TWC's board as being inadequate. That's according to the background of Charter's buying Bright House Networks and TWC included in the preliminary Charter and TWC shareholder proxy vote materials filed Friday with the SEC. Starting in early 2014, Charter began separate negotiations on the acquisition of BHN that ran through the year and into spring 2015, while the Comcast/TWC acquisition was falling apart in the face of FCC concerns about the deal, the proxy materials said. After TWC and Comcast mutually agreed to terminate the deal, Charter CEO Tom Rutledge talked with TWC CEO Robert Marcus about once again looking at a sale, with the two meeting days later at NCTA's annual INTX: the Internet and Television Expo, with Rutledge presenting an offer approved by Charter's board a day earlier of roughly $172.50 per share. That day, an unidentified company also contacted TWC about a possible offer of $180 to $200 per share. That company ultimately told TWC it wouldn't be able to make a formal bid within the time frame TWC specified. The next day, Charter increased its cash-and-stock offer to roughly $195.71 per TWC share. Two days later, May 23, TWC's board unanimously approved the Charter deal.

Shaw Communications plans to offer Comcast's cloud-based X1 video platform, making it the first Canadian cable company to do so, Shaw said Thursday.

Technicolor released a “single-layer solution” for coding and delivering high dynamic range content in a single stream “to accurately display the content regardless of the display type,” including standard dynamic range TVs, the HDR proponent said in a news release. Designed for broadcasters, pay-TV operators and over-the-top streaming services looking to migrate to HDR video, “it allows for the storage and delivery of one video file, which plays back on legacy SDR TVs and new HDR TVs coming to market,” Technicolor said. “Today the option to view HDR content is an either-or scenario depending on screen display, which creates duplicity and inefficiencies in delivering content to the consumer,” said Mark Turner, Technicolor vice president-partnership relations and business development. “Our single-layer technology looks to address such challenges, dramatically reducing storage and bandwidth costs by eliminating the need for two delivery systems.” Technicolor said Wednesday it submitted the technology for standardization to the Motion Picture Experts Group.