Complete Coverage: NATPE 2014
NATPE 2015 will be held a week earlier next January. The show, which will again take place at the Fontainebleau and Eden Roc Resorts in Miami Beach, will kick off on Jan. 20, 2015, the day after Martin Luther King, Jr., Day, and run through Thursday, Jan. 22, 2015, said Rod Perth, NATPE CEO, in a press conference on Wednesday.
That scheduling change, which moves the show up a week, is designed to get NATPE away from Realscreen in Washington, D.C., which has become an increasingly popular event. As a result of that move, “we expect significant growth next year,” said Perth.
The 51st annual NATPE convention was again a lively meeting of programming executives across the content spectrum, including traditional media companies such as Warner Bros., CBS Television Distribution, Debmar-Mercury, NBCUniversal, Twentieth Television, MGM, Endemol USA and so forth, but also including many digital players – such as Netflix, Amazon and Hulu – and brands, such as Chipotle, Unilever and Subway. The number of buyers attending the show was up by double-digits, said Perth, with attendees averaging about 5,000.
“NATPE is increasingly the place where people come together, form relationships and try to figure out where the business is going,” said Jordan Levin, chairman of NATPE’s board and president of Alloy Digital. “We recognized that the syndication marketplace, through consolidation and other factors, had become less dynamic and that most deals were done before NATPE even took place. We also recognized that businesses that are dependent upon content are becoming much less cyclically driven. The net result of that is that you start to shift an emphasis away from transactional business and instead facilitate bringing together the right people to have the right conversations."
“What’s important about NATPE is not the announcements but which business deals people can reflect back on and say those conversations started at NATPE.”
This year’s events didn’t feature much major breaking news, but there were plenty of parties—with Debmar-Mercury, Twentieth, NBC, Endemol USA, Telemundo, MediaLink and others—all holding events, and panels were often full. NATPE’s next event, NATPE Europe, will take place in Prague from June 23 to June 26.
Perth also said that Andy Kaplan, Sony Pictures Television’s president of worldwide networks, will be NATPE’s new vice chair. Kaplan will serve side by side with Levin, who will remain in that seat for at least another year.
