Charles Dolan, the pay-TV pioneer who won Manhattan’s first cable TV franchise, founded HBO and later built Cablevision into the fifth-largest cable company in the U.S., has died at age 98. Dolan passed away on Saturday (28), of natural causes, surrounded by his loved ones, as reported by the newspaper Newsdayciting a statement from his family shared by a spokesperson.
Dolan was considered a visionary and a rebel who constantly surprised investors and competitors, while angering Wall Street by periodically increasing his company’s debt. He outbid or outbid larger competitors to gain control of the founding cable systems of Cablevision and, later, New York’s Madison Square Garden, as well as the professional sports teams that played there—the NBA’s Knicks, the NHL and the WNBA’s Liberty. He remained chairman when his son, James, succeeded him as CEO in 1995.
Dolan lost control of his first two businesses — including HBO — before founding Cablevision in Long Island, New York, in 1973, when it served just 1,500 customers. Even after Cablevision went public in 1986, he maintained control, owning the majority of the Class B shares that elect three-quarters of the company’s directors.
Cablevision launched the nation’s first 24-hour local news channel on Long Island in 1986. As of mid-2015, Cablevision has about 2.6 million video subscribers in the New York City metropolitan area. Later that year, Netherlands-based Altice acquired Cablevision in a $17.7 billion deal, creating the fourth-largest U.S. cable provider. The transaction marked Dolan’s departure from the cable industry after more than four decades, although he served until 2020 as executive chairman of AMC Networks, which had started four decades earlier as a unit of Cablevision.
Dolan has accumulated a fortune valued at US$5.6 billion by the end of 2021, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
Born in Cleveland
Charles Francis Dolan was born on October 16, 1926, in Cleveland, the second of four children of Corinne and David Dolan, an inventor. At age 18, he joined the U.S. Army Air Forces. His military service ended 10 months later, with the end of World War II.
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After returning to Cleveland, he enrolled at John Carroll University, where he met his future wife, Helen Burgess. He did not complete his university education. The couple ran a business from their home, selling 15-minute sports films to television stations. They hired freelancers to film various events, then developed the films and wrote the scripts.
New venture
The venture was not successful. After the birth of his first son, Patrick, Dolan transferred his accounts to Telenews, a competitor in New York, in exchange for a job in 1952. Two years later, he formed a new venture with a Telenews client to use old footage in industrial films and, in 1956, acquired full control of Sterling Movies USA.
Dolan began offering 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—which became known as Sterling Communications—attracted a major investor, Time , which achieved 80% control.
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Alarmed by the company’s voracious need for capital, Time decided to go out of business in 1973, maintaining the HBO pay-TV service and selling the cable franchises in Manhattan and Long Island. Warner Communications quickly stepped forward as a buyer — but its offer was conditional on regulatory approval for the transfer of cable franchises.
Intuition about HBO
Dolan, sensing an opportunity, told Time he would buy the Long Island franchises with no contingencies, cementing the deal with a $100,000 check toward the $900,000 purchase price. Dolan bet that viewers would pay for HBO and more diverse programming.
An opera fan, Dolan founded Bravo in 1980 as a cable network dedicated to the performing arts. In 1984, he launched two cable networks: American Movie Classics and MuchMusic USA. In 1989, Dolan and Hollywood entrepreneur Jerry Perenchio attempted a hostile takeover of Time, which was unsuccessful.
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The Independent Film Channel was created in 1994, followed in 1997 by Romance Classics, which was later renamed WE: Women’s Entertainment. The Sundance Channel was acquired in 2008.
In the late 1990s, Cablevision invested in “Nobody Beats the Wiz” movie theaters and electronics stores and signed a 25-year lease to operate Radio City Music Hall in Manhattan. In 2010, the company spun off its Madison Square Garden unit — including the sports teams, regional sports networks and Radio City — as a separate company.
With his wife, Helen, Dolan had six children: Kathleen; Marianne; Deborah; Thomas; Patrick, president of News 12 Networks; and James, president of the Madison Square Garden Co.
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