Charles Dolan, the founder of Cablevision Systems who also paved the way for the launch of HBO, AMC Networks and MSG Networks, died on Saturday at the age of 98.
A spokesperson for Dolan’s family said his passing was a natural death, and that he was “surrounded by his loved ones.”
“Remembered as both a trailblazer in the television industry and a devoted family man, his legacy will live on,” the spokesperson said.
Dolan helped wire the New York City area’s first cable television system, then called Sterling Manhattan Cable. The system had local telecast agreements to air games played by the New York Knicks basketball team and the New York Rangers hockey club. The Manhattan cable system was later sold to Time; Dolan focused his attention on a similar cable system covering Long Island, which became Cablevision.
Over the years, Cablevision has spun off a number of its assets, including MSG Networks and AMC Networks. The service was sold to Altice USA in 2016.
Sterling had big ideas for commercial-free television on his cable system early on, wanting to create the “Macy’s of television,” according to his obituary in the Wall Street Journal. That came in the early 1970s with the development of what was then called the “Green Channel,” later renamed to Home Box Office, or HBO. The channel launched in November 1972 with a live broadcast of a National Hockey League (NHL) game between the Rangers and the Vancouver Canucks from Madison Square Garden.
HBO grew its footprint by becoming the first pay television channel uplinked to satellite, which allowed it to secure national distribution via large backyard C-Band dishes and made it easier for regional cable headends to pick up the service.
In 1973, Dolan built on his early success with HBO by launching a regional sports network called SportsChannel, which eventually became MSG Networks. Four years later, he founded Rainbow Media Holdings, which launched the Independent Film Channel (IFC), Bravo (later sold to what became Comcast’s NBC Universal) and AMC. MSG Networks and CableVision ultimately came to control Madison Square Garden, the home arena of the Knicks and Rangers. AMC Networks was spun into a separate company in 2011; MSG Networks is now part of Sphere Entertainment.
