The SCTE has moved Cable-Tec Expo from New Orleans in September to Atlanta in October.

Shifts in the schedules of other major conferences created scheduling overlaps that would have been untenable for many vendors who intended to exhibit at almost any combination of events.

For years Cable-Tec Expo had been scheduled in June, but in 2009 the MSOs engineered a rescheduling of almost a dozen different industry shows and conferences so that half would take place during a single week in Spring and the other half within a single week in the Fall.

Few of the show and conference organizers felt well served by that experiment, and there has been a gradual dispersion of shows throughout the year again.

But now the SCTE’s traditional time slot in June has been staked out by the Cable Show (June 10-12 in Washington, D.C.), so the Society planned a move to a time slot a little earlier in the year, to September 18-20.

Ordinarily that might not have been a problem, but shifts in the European trade show schedule created a scheduling conflict. The IFA show in Germany, Europe’s analog to CES in the U.S., shifted later in the year, prompting the IBC show in Amsterdam, which traditionally took place during the first week in September, to also shift back a week, to September 12-17, which created an overlap with Cable-Tec. (The official dates do not overlap, but tear-down and set-up dates do).

To accommodate attendees and exhibitors alike, the SCTE decided to shift back; it is now scheduled to take place Oct. 21-24 at the Georgia World Congress Center in Atlanta.

“SCTE Cable-Tec Expo and the IBC conference and exposition in Amsterdam are the two must-attend fall events for cable executives,” said Mark Dzuban, president and CEO of SCTE.  “Rather than force participants and attendees to divide their focuses between two events and two continents, we’ve taken a flexible approach that puts the needs of the industry first.”

There may yet be additional ripples caused by all the schedule changes. When SCTE moved Cable-Tec back to September, that alleviated a schedule crunch with TelcoVision (until last year called TelcoTV) that many exhibitors have lamented in the past. As of now, TelcoVision is still scheduled for October 23-25 in Las Vegas.