Alan Gerry is a cable television pioneer who founded Cablevision Industries (CVI) and he has an estimated net worth of $1.3 billion as of March 2013 according to Forbes. He is ranked 1107th in the list of World Billionaires and 347th in the Forbes 400 list.

Gerry was a World War II Marine Corps veteran and TV repair shop owner who began constructing an upstate New York cable network in 1956 while trying to bolster the demand for his TV sets. His original system has only the capability to transmit five channels at a time despite the access to seven networks. What he did was to change channels for the whole region while swapping out sometimes a news program to a Yankees game and vice versa. During the 90's, CVI has already established 18 networks from New York to Florida.

In 1996, Allan Gerry sold CVI to Time Warner for a reported $2.8 billion while earning $900 million in the deal. He is a self-described “country boy” who purchased the site of the 1969 Woodstock festival after he was encouraged by his youngest daughter. He then opened the Bethel Woods Center for the Arts in 2006 in order to preserve the historic site. It was a $100 million dollar project which was launched in 2004 by the Gerry Foundation.