A milestone in TV’s ongoing evolution was
announced on Tuesday -- the end of the yearly conference of NATPE, which once upon a time was a must-attend event on the annual calendar of TV industry get-togethers.
But no more.
In an announcement that may have seemed overdue to many, the company that has owned NATPE and its assets since 2022 said the annual NATPE Global conference will be discontinued next year.
In fact, the 2026 conference was held in Miami in February. It now has the distinction of being the last one after 62 years.
The company,
Toronto-based B2B publishing company Brunico Communications, bought what was left of NATPE in a bankruptcy sale, apparently hoping to profit from putting on the annual conference.
“The decision [to discontinue] was deeply considered and stemmed from the market consolidation that continues to progress and have structural impacts on the content
production business,” said the announcement from Brunico.
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NATPE, or National Association of Television
Program Executives, was established in 1963 as a trade association of TV station program directors.
At their meetings, they discussed -- among other things
-- the challenges of acquiring and producing programs.
With programming needs at the top of their agendas, NATPE’s
annual conference evolved into a high-spirited marketplace for first-run and off-network programming, where the major syndicators put up giant sales booths in spacious exhibition spaces.
Eventually, NATPE attracted thousands of attendees. They included program directors, sales managers, promotion heads and general managers from hundreds of TV stations;
network brass whose companies owned the country’s biggest stations; program producers; the stars of the shows, and sales teams from syndication companies both large and small.
The event may have hit its zenith in the late ’80s and ’90s before the onset of the 21st century when the TV business entered an era of rapid change.
In its heyday, the NATPE convention drew the biggest companies in syndication -- companies that were once among the most powerful in all of television.
They included King World Productions, Sony, Buena Vista Television (Disney), Telepictures (Warner), Paramount Domestic Television, MCA, Worldvision, Multimedia
Entertainment, Columbia Pictures Television and more.
But those days are long gone. Today, the old ways of face-to-face dealmaking in bars, restaurants and
hotel suites are long gone.
Over the last decade or more, the annual NATPE conference became a much smaller
event. Most notably, the great exhibition spaces became a thing of the past.
In deciding to call it quits,
it is reasonable to assume that Brunico concluded that there was just not enough attendance or interest to continue.
The TV Blog last attended a NATPE conference in January 2016 in Miami Beach. It may not have had the spectacle and panache of the long-ago NATPEs, but there was still a great deal of
exuberant networking and opportunities for a journalist to amuse himself.
If memory serves, two of the
highlights for me were meeting Evander Holyfield, and interviewing Byron Allen in a striped tent beside the pool at the Fontainebleau.
I attended panel
discussions on the future of programming and met a number of interesting people in syndication and local television.
Judging by a headline on a TV Blog I wrote the day before the start of that year’s conference, the writing may have already been on the wall. The headline read:
“Syndicator-Station Relationship No Longer Center Stage At NATPE Show.”