I remember CNN bursting onto the scene. It was revolutionary. Although there was never (even today) enough news to fill a 24hr period. Just endless repeats of the same block of news.

cnn email alert was how I learned that 9/11 was happening. love or hate the man and the news outlet, but you have to admit that they ushered in the news era of the internet.

Now we can make a "Captain Planet" movie to honor Ted.

Captain Planet and the Planeteers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captain_Planet_and_the_Planete...

The Onion headline should be: Ted Turner dies at 87:05

Before starting CNN, Ted Turner captained the sailing Yacht Courageous to an America's Cup victor 4-0 over the Australians in Newport, RI during what was arguably sailings hay day.

He’s been pretty quiet in the news for a while so he sort of fell into the category of those famous people who when they died, half your response is a bit of surprise that they were still alive (which is neither a good nor bad thing, just a thing¹).

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1. I once had an idea for a party game which involved people trying to guess whether a formerly prominent person was alive or dead.

As a film fan I remember all of the outrage over his plan to colorize classic films. He was also a critic of the film "Taxi Driver" and complained about the film's values.

He was everywhere in the late 70s and early 80s. WTCG -- The Super Station.

> In 2010, Turner joined Warren Buffett's and Bill Gates's The Giving Pledge, vowing to donate the majority of his fortune to charity upon his death.

Does The Giving Pledge still exist? Will this happen?

I remember around 2000 I read about how Ted Turner started his empire: he bought podunk local TV stations that had loose contracts with media owners that allowed them to broadcast shows as often as they wanted, with no restrictions. In the those days, local TV stations were broadcast just like radio and so the assumption was the contract only concerned the audience the TV station's antenna could reach. But the contract didn't specify this. Recognizing the loophole, he bought multiple stations and combined that content into its own cable channel(s) that played old movies and TV shows: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Turner This was the basis that allowed him to branch into CNN and more.

When I learned about this, the story was very applicable to me at the time, as my startup had acquired licenses for content that was historically sold directly to libraries by a salesman who would negotiate with each library individually. He used a standard contract. When we contacted the company to license content for display on the internet, they gave us a ridiculous contract with a small one time fee and access to display the content forever. Only after reasoning through their business model and history did we understand how this occurred, which was exactly the same type of gap that Ted Turner had exploited.

Greatest Contribution to the world is Turner Movie Classics and restoring all that old Hollywood film.

Ted personally funded the 1986 Goodwill Games in Seattle as a direct response to the US/USSR mutual Olympic boycotts of '80 and '84, losing ~$26M out of pocket. CNN also hosted the famous US-Soviet "space bridge" TV linkups around the same time. RIP.