Billionaire Charles Dolan, a trailblazer in bringing cable television to a large part of the US who created what became HBO, has died at age 98.
He was also the head of a family with an “empire” of media and sports properties that includes Madison Square Garden, the New York Knicks and Rangers teams, and AMC Networks. BBC America is a part of AMC.
Dolan’s death was announced in the family’s Long Island newspaper, Newsday, on Sunday.
A native of Ohio, Dolan started out distributing sport and industrial films before moving to New York and realising that, because tall buildings interrupted broadcast signals in the air, Manhattan needed cable.
At the time, he was selling special programming to hotels through his Teleguide service, while cable television was taking off in rural areas.
In 1964 Dolan made a deal with New York to wire some Manhattan buildings with cable and a few years later, hoping to attract viewers, he made a deal to show the Knicks and Rangers play-offs on cable, according to Variety.
He then went on to create Home Box Office for movies, and then sold both his cable service and HBO to build up Cablevision, which ended up providing television and internet to households across the north-eastern United States.
In 2015, the Dolan family sold Cablevision to European company Altice for nearly $18bn (£14.3bn).
By then Dolan’s son James was running what the New York Times called the family’s empire.
And the Dolans had become “the family that New Yorkers often loved to hate”, according to the New York Times, over frustration over the Knicks’ performance and fights with networks over their programming that had threatened to keep customers from watching the Academy Awards and the World Series.
Dolan was worth $5.4bn (£4.3bn) at the time of his death, according to Forbes.
