At the time, it was selling specials to hotels through its Teleguide service, while cable television was gaining ground in rural areas.
In 1964, Dolan made a deal with New York to connect cable to some Manhattan buildings, and a few years later, hoping to attract viewers, he made a deal to show the Knicks and Rangers playoff games on cable, according to Variety.
He then created Home Box Office for movies, then sold his cable service and HBO to create Cablevision, which eventually brought television and Internet to households in the northeastern United States.
In 2015, the Dolan family sold Cablevision to Europe’s Altice for almost $18bn (£14.3bn).
By then, Dolan’s son James was running what the New York Times called the family empire.
And the Dolans became “the family that New Yorkers often loved to hate,” according to the New York Times, amid frustration over the Knicks’ game and a fight with networks over their programming, which threatened to keep customers from watching the awards ceremony. Oscars and the World Series.
According to Forbes, Dolan was worth $5.4bn (£4.3bn) at the time of his death.
