Shares of John Malone’s Liberty Media Interactive (LINTA), owner of “QVC,” are up sharply this morning after the company beat Q2 expectations for revenue and operating profit.

Revenue fell, year over year, to $1.9 billion, the company reported, yielding adjusted Ebitda of $412 million. Still, that was ahead of the $1.834 billion and $345 million average estimate of analysts.

Revenue at QVC, which is most of the business, fell 4 percent to $1.7 billion, though that was an improvement from prior quarters, said QVC president and CEO Mike George.

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Does Liberty Media (LINTA) want to own AOL?

CNBC’s David Faber raised the question this morning at the tail end of a long interview with Liberty Media CEO Greg Maffei. And Maffei indicated that Liberty, the media empire controlled by billionaire investor John Malone, actually does have some interest in the Time Warner (TWX) unit, which is currently on track to be spun off as a separate company via an IPO.

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Why has John Malone been dumping his shares of IAC/InterActiveCorp in the past two weeks?

The company controlled by cable industry pioneer Mr. Malone in recent weeks has sold roughly $17.5 million worth of IAC stock, including a 193,000 share sale reported Tuesday. Mr. Malone’s Liberty Media Corp. is the majority shareholder in IAC, the Internet conglomerate run by Barry Diller.

The recent slate of sales raises questions about whether Mr. Malone is losing confidence in his IAC investment, or simply has found a better use for the cash. Representatives for IAC and Liberty declined to comment Tuesday.

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Former AOL boss Steve Case virtually fled to his Hawaiian pineapple farm after the AOL-Time Warner merger he engineered in 2000 vaporized much of the group’s combined market value. Now that Liberty Media chairman John Malone is open to swapping his 2.8 percent stake in Time Warner for AOL’s dial-up business, the extent of Case’s heroics on behalf of AOL shareholders has become clearer.

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Liberty Media (LCAPA) is “open” to swapping its stake in Time Warner (TWX) for AOL’s dial-up Internet access business, Liberty Chairman John Malone said Monday, Reuters reported.

Malone said there have not been any discussions on the concept so far, however.

“Clearly, an exit from the Time Warner equity stake into a cash-generating asset would be attractive, but at the current time, none have been proposed that we could take action on,” Malone said on a conference call with analysts.

Liberty owns about 103 million shares, or 2.8 percent of Time Warner.

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Now that Barry Diller has won his court case against John Malone, he’s free to break up IAC into 5 pieces. The problem: Convincing investors that those pieces are worth more than the sum of their parts.

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Unless you’re an employee of IAC, you’re probably reading this here first. … We’ve obtained an emailed memo from IAC chairman and CEO Barry Diller to his staff that went out around midnight Eastern as he prepares to fight John Malone’s Liberty Media in a Delaware court for control of the company he founded.

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