NEW YORK — Robert Rosencrans, a daring cable television industry pioneer who was instrumental in creating C-SPAN, the unfiltered network that faithfully covers government proceedings and civic events, died Wednesday in Greenwich, Conn. He was 89.
The cause was complications of a stroke, his son Richard said.
“There probably wouldn’t be a C-SPAN without him,’’ Brian Lamb, the network’s founder and executive chairman, said in an interview.
C-SPAN, a private, nonprofit, industry-financed service, began as the Cable-Satellite Public Affairs Network in 1979, at a time when fewer than 1 in 5 homes was wired for cable.
Today it comprises several television and radio channels and a web presence, offering a variety of gavel-to-gavel coverage of Congress, presidential campaign events, and other public affairs programming.
After Lamb pitched the concept to cable operators, Mr. Rosencrans wrote a $25,000 check on the spot and persuaded other industry executives to pony up $450,000 in seed money. He became C-SPAN’s founding chairman.
In addition to his work with C-SPAN, his Columbia Cable Systems was credited with being the first cable operator to install a satellite receiving station in 1975, to deliver the Muhammad Ali-Joe Frazier championship fight from Manila to its Florida subscribers.
On Thursday, the National Cable Telecommunications Association said Mr. Rosencrans’s early cable systems were “precursors to today’s life-changing television and Internet infrastructure.’’
A native of New York City and a graduate of Columbia University, Robert Morris Rosencrans had brief, unsatisfying stints in retailing before a friend referred him to Box Office Television. The project was hoping to help movie theaters compete with television by offering closed-circuit programming, like live theater, and Harlem Globetrotter basketball and Notre Dame football games.
After Box Office Television bought TelePrompTer in 1956 to expand its closed-circuit programming, Mr. Rosencrans received a call from a cable system operator in Casper, Wyo., who wanted to feed a boxing match to his subscribers.
“Cable system?’’ he asked. “What’s a cable system?’’
A quick study, he recruited other investors and, in 1961, began buying up small-town systems; brokered the 1975 fight broadcast (which was credited with persuading Time Inc. not to pull the plug on HBO); approached Madison Square Garden to start MSG; helped organize, with Kay Koplovitz, the USA Network, which was the first basic cable channel distributed by satellite; offered Robert L. Johnson a few hours of Friday-night satellite time, which became Black Entertainment Television; and then answered Lamb’s invitation to start C-SPAN.
Mr. Rosencrans, a political liberal, invested in C-SPAN with his Columbia Cable partner, Kenneth S. Gunter, a conservative. In 1977, he said that he saw the channel as a public service and a promotional opportunity.
“I was tired of knocking on congressmen’s doors to explain what cable television was,’’ he recalled. “So if nothing else, I thought it would put cable on the map in Washington.’’
