NCTA Discusses Cable Show Agenda

CAB Sales and Management Conference Merged Into Former National Show

By Christian Lewis -- Multichannel News, March 28, 2007

Cuing up The Cable Show 2007 -- scheduled for Mandalay Bay Convention Center in Las Vegas May 7-9 -- members of the National Cable & Telecommunication Association and planners discussed a few differences Wednesday between this year’s agenda and previous iterations of the annual event.

Most noticeable perhaps is the integration of the Cabletelevision Advertising Bureau’s annual Sales Management Conference, which will add several sessions to the confab.

“I think it’s a great example of inter-industry cooperation,” said George Bodenheimer, co-chairman of Disney Media Networks and president of ESPN and ABC Sports, as well as co-chair of this year’s Cable Show. “I compliment the CAB, its management and its members. I think it’s going to be a positive for everybody. It’s a $25 billion business … It’s a real business, it’s moving quickly and there are a lot of new aspects to it.”

Bodenheimer went on to discuss daily themes of The Cable Show including new revenue and new services Monday, May 7; technology Tuesday, May 8; and Wednesday, advertising as a key revenue stream, as well as a look at how business is functioning globally.

“Certainly nothing about what we’re doing anymore is germane only to the United States, and all of these companies are working on international strategies, as well,” he said.

NCTA senior vice president of industry affairs Barbara York noted that although the trade group has always pushed very hard to attract international exhibitors, this is the first year it’s been successful, achieving representation from Korea, China, the Philippines, South America, all of the European countries and Canada, among others.

York, who’s organized The Cable Show (formerly the National Show) for the past 26 years, declined to speculate on the number of attendees. The show in Las Vegas in 1982 was the first to break 10,000 participants. Last year’s event drew roughly 15,000.

The other co-chair for this year’s event, Cox Communications president Pat Esser, mentioned three other points about his year’s show: CableNET, the OCAP (OpenCable Applications Platform) Developers Conference and the educational sessions.

While CableNET -- a partnership between the NCTA and Cable Television Laboratories -- is in its fourth year at the show, Esser stressed that it was an important component for almost every major vendor in the industry, adding, “You’ll get a good taste of IP [Internet-protocol] services we’re bringing to the market, the interactive services in the market and often it is a good way to peek into what’s going to happen in our business 18 months out, 24 months out.”.

AS for the OCAP Developers Conference, this will be the first year the joint-CableLabs-Viddium Systems effort makes an appearance, preceding the show Sunday, May 6. “It’s really how the applications platform, devices and services and interactive applications come together in the cable industry, and third-party companies can come in and use that middleware to bring innovative new services to our customers.”

“And finally, the educational sessions,” Esser said. “The agenda we’ve put together has 87 panel sessions over the three days. It will be the richest, deepest set of sessions in the show’s 56-year history.”

While discussion of business and policy topics was mostly avoided, York did confirm that the NCTA invited all of the Federal Communications Commission members to a public policy lunch, which will be open to the press.

As for placement on the floor at the show, York said the layout was complicated, depending on size, then duration of a company’s time at the show, how much they’ve paid dues, etc. “There is no plan that says we are purposely going to put somebody next to somebody else, or not put somebody next to somebody else,” she said.

The Cable Show will return to New Orleans in 2008, followed by Washington, D.C., in 2009. As for the future, the trade group is talking to “a full slate of cities.”