R.I.P.: Paul Kagan, Cable TV Pioneer, Broadcaster

Paul Kagan

Paul Kagan, who built his expertise in the budding cable television business into the longtime media consulting business Kagan and Associates, died Aug. 23 of kidney failure in Carmel, Calif.

He was 82, according to Variety.

Kagan was born and raised in the Bronx and graduated Hunter College. He started out as a sportswriter in Binghampton, N.Y. and worked as a dj and sports announcer. In New York, he did PR for Stan Lee at Marvel Comics and sold radio advertising. While working as a broadcasting securities analyst at E.F. Hutton, he began his fascination with the cable television industry.

He founded Paul Kagan Associates in 1969, publishing the first newsletter on the subject, and becoming the first analyst to publish public company valuations based on multiples of cash flow and computations of the private value of public media companies.

He moved the company to Carmel in 1978 and over nearly 50 years, published more than 38 newsletters and 95 databooks on cable TV, radio, television, movies, internet and broadband media and sports.

Known as “the cable guru,” Kagan conducted hundreds of seminars and conferences around the world, and served as an appraiser of media values as well as managing stock and bond funds and consulting for companies and government agencies.

Fresh out of Hunter College in the early '60s, Kagan worked at then-WBRX 1280 AM Berwick PA as a DJ and sportscaster.

Kagan and Associates launched the website PKBaseline in 1995, the first to offer pay-per-view information.

PKA was sold to Primedia in 2000, and later renamed Kagan Research. It continues to operate as SNL Kagan, a unit of S&P Global Market Intelligence.

He co-founded the Cable Center in Denver, was co-founder of the John Bayliss Broadcast Foundation, was a fellow of the New York Society of Security Analysts, and was a member of the Media Analysts Group of New York. He was inducted into the Cable Hall of Fame in 2011.