Charles Dolan, HBO founder who built cablevision, dies at 98

By Kathryn Harris

Charles Dolan, the pay-television pioneer who won the first cable-TV franchise in Manhattan, founded Home Box Office Inc. and later built Cablevision Systems Corp. into the fifth-largest US cable company, has died. He was 98.

Dolan died Saturday of natural causes, surrounded by his loved ones, Newsday reported, citing a statement from his family shared by a spokesperson.

Dolan was regarded as a maverick and visionary who continually surprised investors and rivals while vexing Wall Street by periodically running up his company’s debt.

He outwitted or outbid larger competitors to win control of Cablevision’s founding cable systems and, later, New York’s Madison Square Garden as well as the professional sports teams that played there — the Knicks of the National Basketball Association, the Rangers of the National Hockey League and the Liberty of the Women’s National Basketball Association. He stayed on as chairman when his son, James, succeeded him as chief executive officer in 1995.

Dolan lost control of his first two businesses — including HBO — before he founded Cablevision on New York’s Long Island in 1973, when it served only 1,500 customers. There, he kept an iron grip, even after Cablevision went public in 1986, by owning a majority of the Class B shares that elect three-fourths of the company’s directors.

Malone’s Admiration

“I have to admire the way Chuck has built his company and retained control,” Liberty Media Corp. Chairman John C. Malone told the Los Angeles Times in 1994. “His portfolio is greatly diversified. There is no single mistake that could ever take him down.”

Cablevision began the country’s first 24-hour local news channel, on Long Island, in 1986.

Cablevision had about 2.6 million video subscribers in the greater New York City area in mid-2015. Later that year, Altice NV, based in the Netherlands, acquired Cablevision in a $17.7 billion deal, creating the fourth-largest cable provider in the U.S. The transaction marked Dolan’s exit from the cable business after more than four decades. He did serve until 2020 as executive chairman of AMC Networks Inc., which had begun four decades earlier as a unit of Cablevision.

Dolan amassed a fortune worth $5.6 billion as of 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 sons of Corinne and David Dolan, an inventor.

At 18, he joined the U.S. Army Air Forces. His tour of duty ended 10 months later with the end of World War II.

Returning to Cleveland, he enrolled in John Carroll University, where he met his future wife, Helen Burgess.

He didn’t complete his college education. The newlyweds ran a business from their apartment, selling 15-minute sports reels to television stations. They hired freelancers to film various events, then developed the film and wrote scripts.

New Venture

The enterprise wasn’t successful. After the birth of their first child, Patrick, Dolan turned over 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 customer to use old footage for industrial films, and in 1956, he 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 Inc. — attracted a deep-pocketed investor in Time Inc., which gained 80 percent control.

Alarmed by the company’s voracious need for capital, Time decided to pull the plug in 1973, keeping the HBO pay-TV service and selling the cable franchises in Manhattan and Long Island. Warner Communications Inc. quickly materialized as a buyer — but its offer was contingent on winning regulatory approval for the transfer of the cable franchises.

HBO Hunch

Dolan, spying an opportunity, told Time that he would buy the Long Island franchises with no contingency, cementing the deal with a $100,000 check toward the $900,000 purchase price. Dolan played his hunch that viewers would pay for HBO and more diverse programming.

An opera fan, Dolan started Bravo in 1980 as a cable-TV network devoted to the performing arts. In 1984, Dolan started two cable TV networks: American Movie Classics and MuchMusic USA.

In 1989, Dolan and Hollywood entrepreneur Jerry Perenchio mounted an unsuccessful hostile bid for Time Inc.

The Independent Film Channel was started 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 movie theaters and “Nobody Beats the Wiz” electronics stores and signed a 25-year lease to operate Manhattan’s Radio City Music Hall. 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, chairman at Madison Square Garden Co.