Billionaire HBO creator Charles Dolan dies aged 98

Billionaire Charles Dolan, the founder of the US television network that became HBO, has died at the age of 98.

He was also the head of a family that owned a media and sports “empire” that included Madison Square Garden, the New York Knicks and Rangers teams, and AMC Networks. BBC America is part of AMC.

Dolan’s death was announced in the family’s Long Island newspaper, Newsday, on Sunday.

Born in Ohio, Dolan began distributing sports and industrial films before moving to New York and realizing that, because tall buildings interfered with signals in the air, Manhattan needed cable.

At the time, he was selling special programs to hotels through his Teleguide service, while television was taking off in rural areas.

In 1964 Dolan made a deal with New York to wire some Manhattan buildings with cable and a few years later, hoping to attract viewers, he made a deal to show Knicks and Rangers games on cable, according to Variety.

He later created Home Box Office, then sold his cable and HBO businesses to create Cablevision, which ended up providing television and Internet to households in the northeastern United States.

In 2015, the Dolan family sold Cablevision to European company Altice for around $18bn (£14.3bn).

At the time, Dolan’s son, James, was running what the New York Times called a family empire.

And the Dolans became “the family New Yorkers love to hate”, according to the New York Times, because of their frustration with the Knicks and their fight with the network over their programming, which threatened to block customers from watching the Academy Awards and the World Series. .

Dolan was worth $5.4bn (£4.3bn) at the time of his death, according to Forbes.