Conferences

The Carmel Group organizes and hosts premiere conferences and events focused on the cable, telco, satellite and related telecom industries (such as advanced services including IPTV, VoIP, DVRs, HDTV, Interactive TV, and broadband.

Past Events

Five regularly-attended conferences are first noted below. The Carmel Group has presented more than once at four of these five. A sixth example, the 2004 Morgan Murphy Station event, describes another, more intimate, industry get together—on the individual company level—where the expertise and vision of The Carmel Group was called upon to help identify and validate various assumptions, projections and future business models and opportunities.

The June 2007 version of The 5 Burning Qs conference will be The Carmel Group’s 12th version of this annual event. In fact, The 5 Burning Qs has become a standard by which other small-to-moderate-sized telecom conferences are measured.

The next major conference involving The Carmel Group will be the ISCe Satellite Investment Symposium (ISIS-NYC ’06), scheduled to be held all-day, Tuesday, November 28, 2006, in downtown Manhattan, at the law office conference room of Jones Day. FCC Commissioner Jonathan Adelstein will head a notables-packed agenda of the top people on the satellite finance sides of broadcasting, fixed services, mobile services, radio and video/Internet. For more information, CLICK HERE!

Going back to 1994, The Carmel Group has been a yearly participant at this event that traditionally draws between 100,000 and 150,000 attendees, all focused on the consumer electronics (CE) industry. The Carmel Group finds this is an exemplary way to start off the New Year, in Las Vegas no less. It is hard to remember who does not attend CES regularly, in order to catch the latest presentations of CE equipment and ancillary content, hardware and software providers.

Just as it has with the CES annual event, The Carmel Group has given equal attention and attendance annually to the National Association of Broadcasters’ (NAB) annual show, eld in the spring in Las Vegas. The Carmel Group finds that NAB, like CES, has a unique ability to draw not only broadcasters, but also those from surrounding and peripheral industry subsectors. The Carmel Group first presented at NAB in the late 1990s. In 2006, The Carmel Group presented an NAB “Super Session,” with almost 500 audience attendees, entitled “Becoming The Hybrid Network: What Must Broadcasters Do?” This featured speakers leading companies including Intel, Qualcomm, Digeo, MoveiBeam, Kassena and NBC. A second NAB panel by The Carmel Group, entitled “IPTV, Telcos and Satellites: Will They Play Well Together?” was presented during the 2006 NAB, as well. 

The third event to which The Carmel Group has traveled regularly for the past ten years has been the NCTA show, traditionally held in Chicago, IL, Atlanta, GA, San Francisco, CA or New Orleans, LA. NCTA is an important meeting of not only the cable operators, but of many programmers and related multichannel services and vendors, such as those in the interactive TV, HDTV, iTV and IPTV sides of the business. 

Twice, once in 2002 and again in 2005, The Carmel Group gave this exclusive NAB Futures group a look at the future. The last presentation highlighted wireless futures for broadcasters and telecom providers. The NAB Futures conference is an invitation-only gathering held in the spring in Pebble Beach, CA, before the annual NAB event, for the top station group owner and manager members of the NAB trade group organization. 

In April 2004, The Carmel Group was asked by the multi-national corporation, Naspers, headquartered in South Africa, to present to its board of directors and top managers in Shanghai, China. The topic of the presentation was “The Telecom Future 2004-2009.” A version of The Carmel Group’s extensive 2-hour presentation can be requested, for a fee, by calling (831) 643 2222.

In June 2005, The Carmel Group made a keynote, end-of-Day One, half-hour presentation at the “1st Annual C-COR Global Summit” in Barcelona, Spain, on the topic of “Consumer Behavior In A Multichannel World”. Additionally, The Carmel Grpoup conducted its signature Wall Street financial panel, featuring representatives from firms llike Bear Stearns in London, England, which looked at cable, satellite and telephone venutres in and around Europe.

Going back to the early 1990s era, The Carmel Group has attended and presented at what was once one of two pre-eminent satellite finance events on the circuit. This NYC show was discontinued several years ago. The Carmel Group and its co-organizers plan to replace this event in the form of a forthcoming satellite investment forum, known as ISIS-NYC ‘06. ISIS-NYC ‘06 is scheduled to be held in New York City, Tuesday, November 28, 2006, at the law firm of Jones Day. The Carmel Group is proud to serve with the Hannover Fairs organizations and its ISce subsidiary as one of three co-organizers of this event. Those co-rganizeers include Northern Sky Research and Jones Day.

Morgan Murphy Stations Group

At a Scottsdale, AZ board and top executive retreat held at a desert resort during late 2004, The Carmel Group helped position this midwest broadcaster to understand, appreciate and move into new businesses that matched well with its local- and video-based content distribution. An investment in a terrestrial wireless cable broadcaster was an offshoot of this presentation and subsequent lengthy dialogue. The title of the 69-slide presentation was,“There’s Lots of Space Between Zero and One.” It was intended to highlight the opportunities –- and challenges—inherent in digital broadcasting.

Reed’s Broadcasters’ Summit, Atlanta

This event, organized by Reed Business Information (publishers of Multichannel News and Broadcasting & Cable magazines, identified for the first time what were then The Carmel Group’s “classes of telecom operators,” i.e., The Pioneers, The Followers, The Drifters and The Wannabees (representing the satellite, cable, broadcaster and telco operators, respectively). A copy of this presentation can be requested for a fee by calling (831) 643 2222.

Looking into the Future

In the years beyond 2006, The Carmel Group is actively looking to grow and extend its networking and contacts base through its involvement with only the best and most respected of conferences, both at home in the United States, and abroad. More than ten years ago, at its first conference, “DBS: The 5 Burning Questions,” held in Woodland Hills, CA, a participant opined, “You just can’t get to the cutting edge of what’s going on in an industry like ours, unless you attend first class conferences like these. If you just rely on the office and trade magazines and even the Internet, you’ll stay almost six months behind what’s really going on.” It is because of that reality that The Carmel Group will in the future chose to focus so much of its effort and investment in top-rated, long-running and well-run quality conferences.