Charles Dolan, the pay-television pioneer who won the first cable-TV franchise in Manhattan, founded Home Box Office Inc. and later built Cablevision Systems Corp. into the fifth-largest U.S. cable company, has died. He was 98 years old.
Newsday, citing a statement from his family shared by a spokesperson, reported that Dolan died of natural causes on Saturday, surrounded by his loved ones.
Dolan was considered a maverick and visionary who constantly surprised investors and rivals, while periodically upsetting Wall Street by increasing his company’s debt.
He founded Cablevision, the cable system and, later, New York’s Madison Square Garden, as well as the professional sports teams that played there – the National Basketball Association’s Knicks, the National Hockey League’s Rangers, and the Women’s National Basketball Association’s Independence. He remained as chairman when his son, James, succeeded him as chief executive in 1995.
Before founding Cablevision on Long Island, New York in 1973, Dolan lost control of his first two businesses, including HBO, when it served only 1,500 subscribers. There, even after Cablevision went public in 1986, he maintained a strong hold as the majority owner of Class B shares, which elect three-quarters of the company’s directors.
Malone’s praise
John C. Malone, chairman of Liberty Media Corp., told the Los Angeles Times in 1994, “I have to admire the way Chuck built his company and maintained control.” “Him down.”
Cablevision launched the nation’s first 24-hour local news channel on Long Island in 1986.
Cablevision had approximately 2.6 million video subscribers in the New York City area in mid-2015. Later that year, Altice NV, based in the Netherlands, acquired Cablevision in a $17.7 billion deal, creating the fourth-largest cable provider in the US. The transaction marked Dolan’s exit from the cable business after more than four decades. Until 2020, he served as the executive chairman of AMC Networks Inc., which began as a unit of Cablevision four decades ago.
According to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, Dolan amassed a net worth of $5.6 billion by the end of 2021.
born in cleveland
Charles Francis Dolan was born on October 16, 1926, in Cleveland, the second of four sons of Corinne and David Dolan, an inventor.
At the age of 18, he joined the US Army Air Force. His tour of duty ended 10 months later with the end of World War II.
Returning to Cleveland, he enrolled at John Carroll University, where he met his future wife, Helen Burgess.
He did not complete his college studies. The newlywed couple ran a business selling 15-minute sports reels to television stations out of their apartment. He hired freelancers to film various events, then developed the film and wrote the script.
new venture
The venture was not successful. After the birth of his first child, Patrick, Dolan turned his accounts over to a competing New York telenews in exchange for a job in 1952. Two years later, he formed a new venture with a telenews client to use old footage. Industrial Films, and in 1956, he acquired full control of Sterling Movies USA.
Dolan began providing news and information services to a group of Manhattan hotels in 1961, and won the first cable franchise in New York in 1965. His company – known as Sterling Communications Inc. – attracted a deep-pocketed investor in Time Inc. , which gained 80 percent control.
Concerned about the company’s desperate need for capital, Time decided to discontinue the HBO pay-TV service in 1973 and sell the cable franchises in Manhattan and Long Island. Warner Communications Inc. A buyer soon emerged – but its offer was contingent on receiving regulatory approval for the transfer of the cable franchise.
hbo hunch
Dolan, seizing the opportunity, told Time that he would purchase the Long Island franchise with no contingencies and seal the deal with a $100,000 check for the $900,000 purchase price. Dolan predicted that viewers would pay for HBO and more diverse programming.
An opera fan, Dolan started Bravo in 1980 as a cable-TV network dedicated to the performing arts. In 1984, Dolan started two cable TV networks: American Movie Classics and MuchMusic USA.
In 1989, Dolan and Hollywood entrepreneur Jerry Perenchio made an unsuccessful hostile bid for Time Inc.
The Independent Film Channel was launched in 1994, followed by Romance Classics in 1997, later renamed WE: Women’s Entertainment. Sundance Channel was acquired in 2008.
In the late 1990s, Cablevision invested in movie theaters and “Nobody Beats the Wiz” electronics stores and signed a 25-year lease to operate Manhattan’s Radio City Music Hall. In 2010, the company spun off its Madison Square Garden unit – which includes sports teams, regional sports networks and Radio City – into a separate company.
With his wife Helen, Dolan had six children: Kathleen; Marianne; Deborah; Thomas; Patrick, President of News 12 Network; and James, president of the Madison Square Garden Company.
