Charles F. Dolan, who bought a group of small cable TV systems on Long Island in 1973, merged them into a network he called Cablevision and amassed a fortune building an innovative communications, entertainment and sports empire that included HBO and Madison Square Garden and its professional teams, died on Saturday. He was 98.
A representative for Mr. Dolan’s family confirmed the death on Sunday in a statement, which did not say where he died.
Cablevision Systems Corporation had 1,500 customers when Mr. Dolan founded it. It was serving three million cable TV households in the New York metropolitan area and providing internet and digital telephone service when he reached a deal in September 2015 to sell it to Altice, a European media company, for $17.7 billion. Altice USA now runs it under the Optimum brand.
Mr. Dolan “helped establish cable television as an economic, social and cultural force in the United States during the final quarter of the 20th century,” Douglas Gomery, a mass communications scholar, wrote in the 2004 edition of “Encyclopedia of Television,” a publication of the Museum of Broadcast Communications in Chicago.
The deal with Altice, completed in June 2016, included the Long Island-based Newsday and Mr. Dolan’s News 12 cable stations providing news from the New York metropolitan area. But the Dolan family regained control of Newsday two weeks later, buying back a 75 percent interest for an undisclosed sum.
In August 2018, Newsday announced that Mr. Dolan’s son Patrick, who had been the president and majority owner of the Newsday Media Group, had acquired the remaining shares to become the sole owner of Newsday. (Patrick Dolan continued as president of the News 12 stations when Altice obtained them from Cablevision, but later stepped down and was named a senior adviser of the network.)
The Dolan family also remains a powerful presence on the New York sports and entertainment scenes. It owns Madison Square Garden Company, which operates the arena and its teams, the Knicks and the Rangers, along with the MSG sports-programming cable TV stations, all run by Charles Dolan’s son, James, the executive chairman.
A full obituary will follow.
The post Charles Dolan, Cablevision Founder Who Sat Atop a Media Empire, Dies at 98 appeared first on New York Times.
