The tumultuous history of NATPE Budapest — which had a CEE market bouncing from Warsaw to Prague to Budapest, under three separate ownerships, until it finally ended in Dubrovnik, Croatia with a completely new name, NEM — replicated the tumultuous history of the Central and Eastern European region.
After a 33-year run, it is finally the end for NATPE Budapest. The market for Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), which started as DISCOP in 1992 in Warsaw, Poland, closed for good after last year’s run. It became NATPE Budapest in 2012 when it was owned by the U.S.-based National Association of TV Program Executives, and continued in 2023 after Brunico, a Canadian publishing company, acquired it (and the entire NATPE brand) from a U.S. bankruptcy court.
From the beginning, the CEE TV trade show was tumultuous. What started as DISCOP in 1992 became DISCOP East when the CEE TV trade show moved from Warsaw to Budapest, Hungary, in 2001. Later, in 2011, it became DISCOP Budapest. In 2012, it morphed into NATPE Budapest, after NATPE, which had been a DISCOP East shareholder since 2006, took full ownership of the trade show. In 2014, the market moved to Prague, and was renamed NATPE East. But just two years later it returned to Hungary as NATPE Budapest.
In 2023, Brunico acquired the NATPE brand (which included NATPE Budapest and NATPE Global in Miami), after the American TV association went bankrupt.
In September, after a disappointing June 2025 show, Brunico announced that NATPE Budapest would move to late April 2026, but three months later it followed up with the announcement that their CEE trade show would close (officially, it is “taking a pause”). It has been reported that by December 2025 the market had the support of only 36 exhibiting companies.
Erosion to NATPE Budapest’s acceptance into the CEE TV community started to manifest in 2013 with the creation of the New Europe Market (NEM) in Dubrovnik, Croatia — a beautiful, if hard-to-reach tourist town in the Balkans. NEM took possession of the early part of the month of June, while NATPE Budapest kept its late-June calendar dates. Organized by the regional media owner, Sanja Bozic-Ljubicic, CEO of Mediavision, last year’s NEM recorded 200 buyers and 100 exhibitors.
In 2023, the U.K. publishing company C21 also challenged NATPE Budapest with its own Content Budapest TV market, which did not fare well, and moved to Warsaw the following year.
One of the issues was determining how to define the CEE region — taking into account the evolving borders of Eastern Europe and the mixed Central European communities of German, Hungarian, and Slavic heritage — in order to identify the target buying contingent.
In its June/July 2018 Issue, VideoAge, too, tried to tackle the definition of the CEE, but came up with four different explanations. Curiously, the organizers of NATPE Budapest would not touch the subject, so VideoAge reported answers from the U.K. weekly financial magazine, The Economist, from Europe’s
Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, from the World Factbook (which uses CIA definitions), and from Eurovoc (an E.U. publication with a definition used by many U.S. studios).
Ultimately, VideoAge settled on 13 countries, excluding those in CIS (the Russia-dominated Commonwealth of Independent States), but including the Balkan countries, of which Croatia is part.
Now, it is NEM’s turn to prove its ability to settle on the CEE definition and to attract the region’s content buyers.
(By Dom Serafini)
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