The next NAB Show planned as a physical event is attracting “strong early exhibit sales,” with more than 540 companies from 31 countries contracting for 330,000 square feet of space in the Las Vegas Convention Center, said the association Thursday. COVID-19 forced the show’s rescheduling to Oct. 9-13 from its customary April dates. NAB is “on a path to building a critical event that will reunite the industry and create a much-needed forum for building momentum going into 2022,” said Chris Brown, executive vice president-conventions and business operations. Despite COVID-19's uncertainty, “the initial demand has exceeded our expectations,” said Eric Trabb, senior vice president-business development.

CEDIA is accepting entries for the 2021 CEDIA awards program through April 2, it emailed Monday. Project categories are integrated home; media room; home cinema; innovative solution or system; showroom; auto, marine or aircraft; and multiple dwelling unit design. CEDIA members can submit projects in multiple categories; judges will determine cost categories based on all completed entries. Entries will be categorized by region: the Americas, Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) and Asia-Pacific. Regional finalists for installation categories will be announced the week of June 14. Asia Pacific winners will be announced at the Integrate Show at a date to be determined. Americas winners will be announced at the 2021 CEDIA awards event at a date to be determined. EMEA winners and global winners will be announced at the EMEA Awards event at a date to be determined. Manufacturers interested in the CEDIA Awards are invited to submit products for Best New Product and Product Hall of Fame beginning Feb. 8. Information on the program and entry process is available at cedia.net/awards.

Dish Network and Nexstar pointed fingers at each other over a blackout of Nexstar programming on Dish's lineup affecting more than 100 markets in 42 states and Washington, D.C. Nexstar "forced the largest broadcast affiliate station blackout in TV history" and rejected Dish's request for a contract extension, the DBS operator said Wednesday. Nexstar said Dish has a "documented long-term practice of putting its paying subscribers in the middle, rather than reaching agreements with broadcasters and content providers at fair market rates."

Facebook’s oversight board will review content moderation cases concerning hate speech, adult content and harmful material on Facebook and Instagram, said the company Tuesday. The cases include violence against French people, cultural disputes, nudity on breast cancer posts, Nazi quotes and COVID-19 information. More than 20,000 cases were referred to the board, which said it prioritized six cases with “potential to affect lots of users around the world.” Five were brought through user appeals, the sixth referred by Facebook. The board seeks comment by Dec. 8 at 8 a.m. EST.

Online registration for the virtual CES 2021, previously scheduled to go live Tuesday (see 2010200026), "got pushed" to Thursday, emailed CTA spokesperson Jamie Kaplan, for undisclosed reasons. CTA will host a Dec. 15 virtual news conference where "we will be making some announcements and revealing the platform" for CES 2021, said Kaplan. The briefing will be a digital replacement for the physical CES Unveiled New York event in mid-November, which CTA scrapped in August due to the pandemic (see 2008250022). CTA picked Microsoft as its “cloud platform provider” to run CES 2021 as a four-day virtual event (see 2010190043). It opens Jan. 11 with a daylong media-only event.

“The profusion of crystal-clear, widescreen digital HDTV sets in almost every American home and office, we just take for granted today,” former FCC Chairman Richard Wiley told a commemorative industry Zoom call Monday. Wiley chaired the FCC Advisory Committee on Advanced Television Service for 12 years. Saturday was the 25th anniversary of ACATS' final report to the commission, recommending adoption of the Grand Alliance HDTV system as “better than any of the four original” DTV proposals and “superior to any known alternative system.” Wiley doubts ATSC 3.0 “would be possible were it not for the work of the Grand Alliance and the advisory committee,” he said. What “really surprised” Wiley about the Grand Alliance proposal “was how much opposition we got from government and business leaders,” he said. “It all seems still very odd to me,” he said: “Yet all the credit” should go to ACATS and Grand Alliance members “who just continued to plod along and do your work, criticism notwithstanding, and stayed the course and made HDTV a reality.”

Cloud service providers need to better coax creators to move their content production to the cloud, Microsoft Azure Media and Entertainment Chief Technology Officer Hanno Basse told a SMPTE 2020 virtual conference keynote Tuesday. Azure embarked on a “customer listening tour” with “well-prepared survey questions,” canvassing nearly four dozen “top creators” in the film and TV industry, said Basse, CTO at 20th Century Fox Film before its sale to Disney and ex-founding president of the UHD Alliance. He joined Microsoft in April. The survey's goal was to give Azure a “good, wholesome picture” about the creative industry’s cloud “expectations,” using that feedback to better “inform” its product development process, he said. Azure heard from creators that cloud vendors “need to do a better job of actually raising awareness as to what cloud production actually means and the benefits that it brings,” said Basse. An important part of that is “total cost of ownership,” he said. Creators told Azure “security and access control” are fundamentally important cloud requirements, he said. It heard from “people in the trenches” that there’s a constant “tug of war” between personnel on the set and studio heads about “what they want to make available to the studio executives,” he said. “Not every day is perfect on set, so there needs to be a way of not exposing everything that goes on there.”

NAB's board voted unanimously Tuesday to require additional payments from members to address “extreme loss of revenue” due mostly to the cancellation of the 2020 NAB show, said a letter. “This had a significant impact on the organization’s bottom line, accounting for the loss of 70% of operating revenue,” said the Virginia Association of Broadcasters in a letter to NAB members Wednesday from Leonard Wheeler, of Wheeler Broadcasting. Wheeler didn’t respond to a request for comment Thursday, but an NAB spokesperson confirmed that the vote took place. “The NAB Board of Directors made the difficult, but unanimous decision to assess members an amount equal to each member’s annual dues payment,” the letter said. “This was necessary to preserve the core advocacy functions of the organization.” To account for the pandemic-related financial difficulties faced by broadcasters, the assessment is payable over three years in installments, with the first payment due Dec. 31, 2021. The letter said NAB has taken cost-cutting measures, including “reducing executive salaries, instituting a hiring freeze and making budget cuts to non-mission critical initiatives.”

Salamander Designs furniture for commercial audio-visual installations is part of the displays at new Technological Innovations Group Experience Spaces in Frankfurt and London, said the company Tuesday. Plans also call for collaborations at TIG’s operations in Paris, Moscow and Johannesburg, displaying its Unifi conference and Huddle tables and conferencing furniture.

CTA plans to charge a $149 fee to most who register to attend virtual CES 2021. The fee will apply to most attendees, including retailers, and journalists will be exempt, we were told Tuesday. The fee was described as an effort to defray expenses. Exhibitors will be offered a series of paid participation tiers, beginning with a basic package that starts at $1,200, up to a five-figure premium offer. The different tiers give exhibitors access to varying apportionments of Microsoft technologies to leverage for news conferences, virtual meetings and other CES activities under the “cloud platform” contract announced Monday (see 2010190043). "As with the live show, there will be a charge to participate and alumni groups will be granted a window to register for free," emailed a CTA spokesperson. "We will be sharing more details closer to registration," which opens Dec. 1, she said. "We will be offering three different exhibitor packages that meet the varying needs of our exhibitors for their CES digital activation." A stickler for auditing show attendance at physical CES events, CTA hasn't determined how the virtual event will be audited for accuracy in attendance, she said. "For live shows, CES has always been independently audited. We are still assessing options for an independent audit including recommended standards."