NATPE is saying sayonara to Sin City, telling TV types: Bienvenido a Miami.
The annual trade show for the syndication business will move east to Miami in January 2011, ending an eight - year run in Las Vegas. That's the word from Broadcasting and Cable's Paige Albiniak, who broke the news on the magazine's website Tuesday evening.
NATPE, under chairman Rick Feldman, has been struggling to reinvent itself in recent years. The once-mighty convention has shrunk in size in recent years and relocated to the Mandalay Bay Hotel in Las Vegas (after previously utilizing the full-size Las Vegas Convention Center).
The consolidation of the convention has coincided with the shrinking of the syndication business, which has been hard hit by the same factors facing all of the TV business.
Feldman told B&C he thinks Miami makes sense because of the convention's international appeal, with attendees from Europe and Latin America. The shift could make it harder to attract LA-based programming executives for panels and other events, since the show will no longer be a short one-hour plane ride from the office.
The 2010 edition of NATPE - the National Association of Television Program Executives - is still slated to run January 25-27 in Las Vegas.
