Billionaire Charles Dolan, a pioneer in bringing cable TV to much of the US and created what became HBO, has died at 98.
He was also the head of a family with an “empire” of media and sports properties that includes Madison Square Garden, the New York Knicks and Rangers and AMC Networks. BBC America is part of AMC.
Dolan's death was announced in the family's Long Island newspaper, Newsday, on Sunday.
An Ohio native, Dolan began distributing sports and industrial films before moving to New York and realizing that because tall buildings cut off broadcast signals in the air, Manhattan needed cable.
At the time, he was selling special programs to hotels through his Teleguide service, while cable television was gaining popularity in rural areas.
In 1964 Dolan made a deal with New York to wire some buildings in Manhattan, and a few years later, hoping to attract viewers, he made a deal to show the Knicks and Rangers playoffs on cable, according to Variety.
He then created Home Box Office for movies and then sold his cable service and HBO to build Cablevision, which eventually brought television and Internet to households in the northeastern states.
In 2015 the Dolan family sold Cablevision to the European company Altice for nearly $18 billion (£14.3 billion).
At the time, Dolan's son, James, ran what the New York Times called the family's empire.
And the Dolans became “the family New Yorkers often loved to hate,” according to the New York Times, because of disappointment with the Knicks' performance and battles with the networks over their programming that threatened to keep 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.