NATPE pledges no more summit clashes, claims success

The organisers of the NATPE programming market in Miami have pledged to avoid the kind of scheduling issues that have seen it run concurrently with the Real Screen Summit for the past two years.

“Real Screen and NATPE will never collide again,” NATPE CEO Rod Perth said as the Miaimi event wrapped up. “They do what they do and we do what we do and they won’t compete.”

The schedule clash has forced international execs to choose between Miami and Washington where Real Screen’s factual confab is held.

Perth was keen to put to bed rumours circulating all week that NATPE was returning to New Orleans in 2014. Next year it will again be in the Fontainebleau hotel and start on Tuesday, January 20. That means it will run the week preceding Real Screen.

Perth hailed this year’s NATPE a success and the event felt busier than in 2012. Perth would not break out any attendance numbers when asked by TBI, but noted that “there has been double-digit growth in buyers attending.”

NATPE’s next event its annual European market, which is being relocated from Budapest, Hungary, to the Czech capital of Prague and takes place at the end of June.

The organisers are hoping to have the majors and other sellers working from the same base – the Hilton Hotel – and are hoping the move revitalises the market in the same way the relocation from Las Vegas to Miami did for its US equivalent.