Charles Dolan, a cable pioneer and patriarch of the Dolan family, which controls media companies, entertainment venues and sports teams, died Dec. 28 of natural causes, Newsday reported. He was 98.
“It is with deep sorrow that we announce the passing of our beloved father and patriarch, Charles Dolan, the visionary founder of HBO and Cablevision,” the family said in a statement to Newsday. The news outlet was once co-owned by Charles Dolan and his son, Patrick, who now owns it.
While Charles “Chuck” Dolan made his mark alongside cable TV trailblazers like Ted Turner, John Malone and Ralph Roberts, he also shaped the industry as a programmer. While on a cruise with his family, Dolan was mulling a problem facing his company, Sterling Manhattan Cable. He needed a way to offset the hefty costs of wiring the densely populated concrete canyons of New York City with cable (providing relief from the spotty reception available via a conventional antenna). Dolan’s solution: The Green Channel.
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The network, soon renamed Home Box Office, was billed as “the Macy’s of television,” presenting live events, sports and movies without commercial interruption for customers wiling to pay a monthly fee. HBO went on the air in 1972 and led the charge for the cable revolution, with CNN, Nickelodeon and ESPN soon to follow. Customers frustrated by fussing with rabbit ears atop their TV consoles, soon started to see cable as a reliable workaround, with early programming welcoming them to a new, higher-tech TV experience.
For Dolan, the HBO experiment was largely a means to an end. Once it gained traction and enabled him to continue laying cable infrastructure, he sold his interest in HBO along with the Sterling assets to Time Inc. in 1973, using the proceeds to create a new cable provider, Cablevision.
Although Dolan grew up in Cleveland, OH, he had settled in New York. Amid the urban convulsions and financial squalor of the 1970s, Dolan set his sights on the booming suburbs, a population of millions eager to plug into cable TV. Cablevision’s headquarters were established on Long Island, just east of New York, eventually taking over a former Northrop Grumman facility in Bethpage.
Cablevision grew into one of the top U.S. cable operators, with service in 19 states, but ultimately refocused on the greater New York area, with systems in New York, New Jersey, Connecticut and a slice of Pennsylvania. As a major distribution force at a time when cable was adding millions of new customers each year, Cablevision became the engine of the Dolan media empire, which was heavily weighted toward New York. Along with Newsday and the Clearview movie theater chain, the family acquired prestige entertainment venues like the Beacon Theater and Radio City Music Hall, along with major sports franchises the New York Knicks and Rangers and the building where they play, Madison Square Garden. Rainbow Media, which operated AMC and other cable networks was also under the Cablevision umbrella. Later renamed AMC Networks, it spun off from Cablevision in 2011.
Dolan, who got his start making sports newsreels and industrial films, also saw an opportunity to create regional cable news outlets, an echo of his inspiration for HBO as a way of luring subscribers with essential programming. In 1986, he was instrumental in Cablevision’s launch of News 12 Long Island, the first 24-hour regional cable news channel in the U.S. It spawned the News 12 Networks group of local news channels in the New York area.
Cablevision was sold in 2016 to French telecom firm Altice for $17.7 billion. The company continues to provide TV, broadband and wireless service outside of New York under the Optimum brand.
In 2020, Charles Dolan stepped down as executive chairman of the board of directors of AMC Networks, which had been spun out from Cablevision into a separate public company in 2011.
The Dolan family, whose net worth is estimated at $5.4 billion, retains a controlling stake in Madison Square Garden, along with the Knicks, Rangers and Radio City Music Hall.