ownership of the corporate entity that operated Starz, Encore Media Group, to sister company Liberty Media; TCI retained a 20% minority ownership interest in Encore Media Group. Liberty Media assumed the former company's stake in the subsidiary in 1999, following TCI's merger with AT&T Corporation. By May 1998, Starz maintained a subscriber base reaching 7.6 million households with a cable or satellite television subscription. 2000s onwards The network gained carriage deals with many other major U.S. cable and satellite providers by the early 2000s, particularly with the adoption of digital cable, allowing for providers to add channels that they (even with capacity expansions of up to 60 channels) previously had limited room to carry. Encore Media Group was renamed the Starz Encore Media Group in 2000. As part of a corporate restructuring plan in 2003, Starz Encore Group eliminated 100 jobs in its nine regional offices, and closed four of the offices outright. On March 25, 2005, the Starz Encore Group corporate entity was renamed Starz Entertainment. A few days later, on March 28, 2005, Starz introduced a new logo, and was subsequently rebranded as "starz", in all lowercase. On November 19, 2009, Liberty Media spun off Starz into a separate public tracking stock called Liberty Starz. On January 1, 2010, Chris Albrecht joined Starz as its president and chief executive officer, then overseeing all of the Starz entities including Starz Entertainment, Overture Films, Anchor Bay Entertainment and Film Roman. On August 8, 2012, Liberty Media announced that it would spin off the Liberty Starz subsidiary into a separate publicly traded company. The spin-off of the subsidiary was completed on January 11, 2013, with Liberty Starz changing its name to Starz as a result. On April 5, 2016, Starz was rebranded, introducing a new logo, this time stylized as "STARZ" in all uppercase. As part of the rebranding, Starz added all the Encore channels to its moniker, therefore increasing the Starz channel lineup to 14 Starz premium channels. Its main channel was rebranded Starz Encore and carries reruns of Starz Originals in addition to films. On June 30, 2016, Lionsgate agreed to acquire Starz Inc. for $4.4 billion in cash and stock; the acquisition was completed five months later on December 8. In April 2019, Starz was widely criticized in the tech press and by the Electronic Frontier Foundation for sending legal demands to Twitter in order to remove links