Charles F. Dolan7xm, who founded HBO, merged a group of small Long Island cable TV systems into a network he called Cablevision and amassed a fortune building an innovative communications, entertainment and sports empire that included 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 in 1973. 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.
zenith slotsImageMr. Dolan in 1979. By the mid-1980s, Cablevision and its affiliated companies had about 618,000 subscribers in the New York metropolitan area, Chicago, Boston and the Cleveland suburbs.Credit...Dick Yarwood/Newsday RM, via Getty ImagesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.
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