Cable Show 2009: Walkups Push Attendance Past 12,000
Local Comcast, Cox Officials And DC Legislators Drove Event Past NOLA's Level
Kent Gibbons -- Multichannel News, 4/4/2009 7:48:13 AM
Washington — Complete Cable Show 2009 coverage from Multichannel News
Cable Show '09's Washington, D.C., location helped juice convention attendance well beyond the expected 10,000 attendees, as National Cable & Telecommunications Association CEO Kyle McSlarrow announced Friday that attendance topped 12,000 - even surpassing the 2008 total of 12,100.
So if the show floor seemed crowded at times, it was.
Restricted travel, especially among cable operators, was expected to depress the turnout about 20% from last year's total in New Orleans. But the Washington Convention Center was convenient to Capitol Hill, and McSlarrow reported more than 400 elected officials and staff members checked out the entertainment, telemedicine and widget displays at the Broadband Nation home-technology area.
"People were coming over [to see the display] because they heard about it. It was word of mouth," convention co-chairman Michael Willner, of Insight Communications, said Friday. "We're very pleased. We actually exceeded last year's numbers, which we never expected to do."
Washington also has a base of cable employees from Comcast and Cox, among others, and being local made the Cable Show an option for them, an NCTA official noted.
As for cool stuff, Sanford Bernstein analyst Craig Moffett gave a shout-out to the U-2 concert in high-definition 3-D shown at Broadband Nation.
"A gigantic HD screen offering 3-D enhanced content is a not so subtle reminder that there remain plenty of potential applications that capitalize on cable's capacity advantage and that put additional distance between the cable plant and lower bandwidth alternatives," Moffett said in an upbeat research note Friday from the convention.
The Wire dug demos of Panasonic's Easy Touch - a prototype remote control that has no numbered buttons. It lets you change channels, type in an on-screen keyboard and access other features by sliding your thumbs around on the remote's touch-sensitive pad. It also has a motion-sensing capability like the Nintendo Wii, so you can perform some actions by waving the remote around.
Panasonic (which also demoed Easy Touch at January's Consumer Electronics Show) isn't saying when it'll be available commercially. Judging by the traffic at the vendor's booth, the idea got two thumbs up from show-goers.
