Charles F. Dolan is one of the least known but most powerful moguls in the modern cable television industry in the United States. In early 1995, his corporate creation, Cablevision Systems Corporation, ranked as the fifth-largest operator in the United states, serving some 2.6 million subscribers in 19 states, about 1.5 million of them in the New York metropolitan area. “Chuck” Dolan’s Cablevision Systems also owns and controls a number of noted cable television networks, headed by the popular and influential American Movie Classics (AMC). In 1995, the New York Times estimated Dolan’s net worth at $175 million.

Headquartered in Long Island, New York, Dolan organized Cablevision Systems in 1973. He had started in the cable TV business a decade earlier with Sterling Television, an equipment supplier, which acquired the cable franchise for the island of Manhattan in the 1960s. Then, in 1970, he founded Home Box Office (HBO). When Time Life Inc. purchased HBO and Sterling Manhattan Cable, Dolan used the substantial proceeds from the deal to buy some Long Island systems that he turned into Cablevision Systems.

Dolan correctly figured that the action for cable would move to the suburbs and turned the locus of Cablevision Systems to the millions of potential customers living in areas surrounding New York City, particularly in Long Island’s close-in Nassau and Suffolk counties. In time, Dolan also acquired franchises controlling 190,000 customers in Fairfield, Connecticut; 250,000 more in northern New Jersey; and 60,000 in Westchester County, New York. He also purchased or built cable TV systems across the United States, in Arkansas, Illinois, Maine, Michigan, Missouri, and Ohio.

In 1988, Dolan added the National Broadcasting Company (NBC) as a minority partner. General Electric had recently purchased NBC and prior to that had helped Dolan finance the expansion of Cablevision Systems. After that, Dolan, with the help from NBC, moved into cable network programming in a major way. He crafted AMC into the top classic movie channel on cable. Building through grassroots marketing, AMC quietly became one of the fastest-growing cable networks of the early 1990s. Soon the New York Times was lavishing praise on AMC:

It’s more than nostalgia. It’s a chance to see black-and-white films which may have slipped through the cracks. It’s wall-to-wall movies with no commercials, no aggressive graphics, no pushy sound, no sensory MTV overload, no time frame. There’s a sedate pace, a pseudo-PBS quality about AMC. It’s the Masterpiece Theater of movies.

Dolan has also done well with sports programming, but on a regular basis. Dolan’s regional sports channels broadcast all forms of sports to millions of subscribers to his and other cable systems in the New York City area. The New York Yankees and New York Mets baseball games are particularly successful. By 1994, Dolan had done so well that he partnered with billion-dollar conglomerate ITT to purchase Madison Square Garden for $1 billion. Suddenly, Cablevision Systems was the major player in sports marketing in the New York City area, owning the Knicks basketball team, the Rangers hockey team, the Madison Square Garden cable TV network, and the most famous venue for indoor sports in the United States. However Dolan’s other great experiments, 24-hour local news on cable TV and Bravo arts channel, were not as profitable.

Local around-the-clock news began in 1986 as News 12 Long Island. This niche service came about because New York City’s over-the-air TV stations seemed unable to serve Long Island. Viewers appreciated not only News 12’s basic half-hour news wheel but also its multipart reports that ran for a half hour or more. Under current economic constraints, New York City television stations could never telecast such programs.

With prize-winning series on breast cancer, drug abuse, and Alzheimer’s disease, News 12 Long Island established a brand image. During election campaigns, the channel regularly staged candidate debates, and local politicians loved having their faces presented there. But little money came in to pay for these features, and only after a decade did it seem that News 12 would finally make money.

The same difficult economic calculus affected the arts-oriented Bravo channel. It was popular with well-off consumers, but too few of these turned in on a regular basis. In the mid-1990s, Bravo seemed doomed, but when it partnered with NBC, its fortunes improved, doing well through the opening of the 21st century.

Dolan’s accomplishments have been considerable. Though not well known to the general public, he helped establish cable television as an economic, social, and cultural force in the United States during the final quarter of the 20th century. He represents the TV entrepreneur in the same true sense of the word, comparable to more publicized figures who started NBC and the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS), David Sarnoff and William S. Palay.

Dolan continues to look to the future, seeking significant positions for his menu of cable programming networks and franchises on the “electronic superhighway.” Like other cable entrepreneurs of the late 20th century, he pledged to make available 500 channels, movies on demand, and interactive video entertainment and information. However, not all such promises have been fulfilled. By 2001, Dolan had turned most of the day-to-day operations to his son James, and for its core profits, the company still depended on its 2.9 million cable TV subscribers in the suburbs of New York City. As the 21st century began, Cablevision System’s high-speed Internet plans were proceeding very slowly. Having acquired The Wiz electronics store and the Clearview Cinema chain in the late 1990s, the company, like many other new media corporations, seems unsure where to find the next television breakthrough.