Billionaire Charles Dolan, the pioneer in bringing cable television to much of the US who created what became HBO, has died at the age of 98.
He was also the head of a family that owns a media and sports “empire” that includes Madison Square Garden, the New York Knicks and Rangers teams, and AMC Networks. BBC America is part of AMC.
Dolan’s death was announced in the family’s Long Island newspaper, Newsday, on Sunday.
A native of Ohio, Dolan began distributing sports and industrial films before moving to New York and realizing that, because tall buildings interfered with broadcast signals, Manhattan needed cable.
At the time, he was selling special programs 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 connect certain Manhattan buildings by cable and a few years later, hoping to attract viewers, he made a deal to show the Knicks and Rangers playoffs on cable, according to Variety.
He then went on to build Home Box Office for movies, then sold both his cable service and HBO to form Cablevision, which eventually provided television and Internet to homes in the northeastern United States.
In 2015, the Dolan family sold Cablevision to European company Altice for around $18bn (£14.3bn).
At the time Dolan’s son James ran what the New York Times called the family empire.
And the Dolans had become “the family New Yorkers used to hate,” according to the New York Times, out of frustration with the Knick’s performance and battles with networks over their programming that threatened to block 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.
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