Martin Lafferty, a longtime TV executive who oversaw groundbreaking pay-per-view coverage of the Summer Olympics while at NBC, helped launch networks at Turner Broadcasting System and helped steer several new-media startups, died on April 5 after a sudden illness, according to friends and a published obituary. He was 76 years old and is survived by his wife, Sari Lafferty, two children and grandchildren.
The recipient of awards from cable-industry organizations NCTA (President's Award) and CTAM (TAMI), Lafferty served in video-content management roles at entities including Microsoft TV, FutureVision and Tempo TV after working as VP of NBC’s Olympics joint venture with Cablevision, where he provided hands-on supervision of the first multichannel coverage of the Summer Games via pay-per-view channels, according to personal biographies and contemporary news coverage of the venture. While the “Triplecast” experiment (which showed events on three pay-per-view channels) was financially unsuccessful due to low consumer demand, no one today would scoff at multiplatform TV coverage of such a wide-ranging set of athletic events. According to his personal biographies, while at Turner Broadcasting Lafferty also worked on the reformatting and relaunching of CNN2 as Headline News and the creation and launch of TNT. He formed Lafferty Media Partners in 2002 to continue some of the creative projects that had been incubated at digital television production/distribution firm Zoom Culture (ZCTV), where he was president and CEO, a LMP biography on LinkedIn states. He also served as chief creative officer at StreamSearch Live, a search engine focused on live streaming content, and as CEO of the Distributed Computing Industry Association, a trade group aimed concerned with commercial development of peer-to-peer file sharing. FutureVision, where he was president in the mid 1990s, partnered with the phone company Bell Atlantic on a pioneering “video dialtone” offering of multichannel TV to consumers in competition against cable.
Lafferty was professionally trained as a film and television producer-director, earning his master of fine arts degree at the Yale School of Drama, his biographies note, and he combined that love with a passion for safe boating in a more recent venture, into his legacy educating others through his Lafferty Media Partners-produced videos on America's Boating Channel. He was actively involved with the United States Power Squadrons, also known as America's Boating Club, where he was a past district commander and advanced pilot.
A memorial service will be held on Thursday, April 10, at 10:30 a.m. at Congregation Ahavat Olam Rabbi Idan Irelander in North Andover, Massachusetts.
