Charles F. Dolan, who based HBO, merged a gaggle of small Lengthy Island cable TV programs right into a community he known as Cablevision and gathered a fortune construction an leading edge communications, leisure and sports activities empire that integrated Madison Sq. Lawn and its skilled groups, died on Saturday. He used to be 98.A consultant for Mr. Dolan’s circle of relatives showed the loss of life on Sunday in a commentary, which didn’t say the place he died.Cablevision Techniques Company had 1,500 consumers when Mr. Dolan based it in 1973. It used to be serving 3 million cable TV families within the New York metropolitan house and offering web and virtual phone provider when he reached a deal in September 2015 to promote it to Altice, a Ecu media corporate, for $17.7 billion. Altice USA now runs it below the Optimal emblem.Mr. Dolan “helped identify cable tv as an financial, social and cultural pressure in the US all over the general quarter of the twentieth century,” Douglas Gomery, a mass communications student, wrote within the 2004 version of “Encyclopedia of Tv,” a e-newsletter of the Museum of Broadcast Communications in Chicago.The handle Altice, finished in June 2016, integrated the Lengthy Island-based Newsday and Mr. Dolan’s Information 12 cable stations offering information from the New York metropolitan house. However the Dolan circle of relatives regained keep an eye on of Newsday two weeks later, purchasing again a 75 % hobby for an undisclosed sum.