DoddTo Debut at NATO Summit

New
Motion Picture Association of America CEO Chris Dodd will make his first speech
in that job at the National Association of Theater Owners (NATO)/CinemaCon convention
March 29 in Las Vegas.

Dodd,
who joined the MPAA March 17, will deliver
a state of the industry address alongside NATO CEO John Fithian.

No
word on what he will talk about, but the motion picture industry is coming off
a banner year in 2010
driven in part by the popularity of 3D
(and those additional glasses charges). But it faces the challenge of
protecting distribution in a world filled with online digital pirates.

Theater
owners have long been concerned that the studios are shortening their
distribution windows and migrating their movies to other distribution platforms
-- like cable and satellite and online --
that they can more easily control, though in the case of online piracy control
is no easy task.

Dodd
is the former Democratic senator from Connecticut.

John Eggerton

Contributing editor John Eggerton has been an editor and/or writer on media regulation, legislation and policy for over four decades, including covering the FCC, FTC, Congress, the major media trade associations, and the federal courts. In addition to Multichannel News and Broadcasting + Cable, his work has appeared in Radio World, TV Technology, TV Fax, This Week in Consumer Electronics, Variety and the Encyclopedia Britannica.