The exhibit floor at the Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas buzzed with activity this week. Thousands dodged each other as they hustled from booth to booth to sample wares and do deals. You could smell the money.

All agreed. It was the best Snowsports Industry Association convention ever.

Sorry. Just a joke. I have no idea what was going on with the snowboarding and skiing outfitters. I was upstairs in another cavernous convention hall for NATPE.

And I can tell you that the NATPE exhibition was pretty much the opposite of what I described above. Traffic was sparse. No excitement. No energy.

“It’s Day 1 and it feels like Day 3,” said an executive from the one of the big studios.

Yet, after talking to several program distributors—large and small—and TV broadcasters, I have to conclude that NATPE still is an important and productive convention, if not for the big studios, then certainly for scrappy independent distributors like Debmar-Mercury, Program Partners, MGM, Litton and Mighty Oak.

The little guys love the show.

“I have 250 working days in the year,” said Litton’s Dave Morgan. “These are the three best.”

“I will be there as long as I have a show to syndicate,” said Mighty Oak’s Mark OBrien.

With the majors having nothing new to say, Program Partners could take center stage on Tuesday morning to introduce Marie Osmond as the host of a new talk show it was cooking up for the fall of 2009.

By keeping it quiet, Ritch Colbert and Josh Raphaelson were able to draw a big crowd to their hotel suite for the announcement. “This trumps everything we’ve done to date,” Colbert gushed.

The indies had no complaints about the lack of buyers. For the most part, the presidents and CEOs of the big station groups weren’t around, but their programming lieutenants were—the likes of Bruce Baker of Cox, Steve Gleason of Media General, Frank Cicha of Fox, Marla Drutz of Scripps and Bill Butler of Sinclair.

Hearst-Argyle Television’s Emerson Coleman was there as buyer and seller. On two occasions, I ran into him in the company of Carlos Watson, a personable former CNBC and CNN commentator who now hosts a quarterly talk show for the station group.

Coleman is looking for other groups to carry the program so he can turn it into a full-fledged show.

Mighty Oak’s OBrien also appreciated the interest that buyers other than broadcasters showed in his Whacked Out Video and Whacked Out Sports.

“Broadband and mobile people were aggressively seeking to license my content,” he said.

He even got approached by a DVD distributor, he said.

The NATPE conference—the panels, speeches and such—also received high marks, although one broadcaster was heard to complain: "NATPE ought to put up signs that say 'Question and Answer periods during panel discussion are NOT to be used by Australian producers to pitch their damn shows.'"

On the other hand, as MediaPost reported, attendance by media buyers and advertisers fell off substantially, despite NATPE’s effort to make itself more attractive to them.

As I see it, NATPE has two problems.

First, the majors have lost much of their enthusiasm for the show. You get the sense from talking to them that their cost-benefit analysis of NATPE makes participation a wash at best.

The majors do their business in the fall and none had much news to share last week, although Disney-ABC surprised everybody with announcements of a new weekend action hour—Wizard’s First Rule—and a Tribune pick up.

Of course, as we all know, two of the majors—Sony and CBS Paramount Pictures—weren’t there. Well, not officially anyway.

Sony abandoned NATPE for CES (three weeks earlier in Vegas) and CBS pulled out on some whim of the late Roger King.

But, in fact, both syndicators were at NATPE—or close by, I should say.

They were lodged at the Mandalay Bay complex’s swank Four Seasons Hotel, where they siphoned off buyers and did business as usual (or as unusual), much to the dismay of the NATPE organizers.

“Well, it’s not nice,” NATPE President Rick Feldman told The Hollywood Reporter when asked about Sony. “We're all part of the TV business. They could have been properly involved.”

Agreed. It was not nice. Kind of cheesy, actually. Why should companies like Debmar-Mercury and Radar Entertainment have to subsidize the business activities of behemoths like Sony and CBS?

NATPE’s other problem is that there are two well-heeled competing organizations that apparently want NATPE to die—the Consumer Electronics Association and the National Association of Broadcasters.

Both want the NATPE business for their own. Both had agents on the floor talking to exhibitors this week.

NATPE organizers feel that it is no accident that the NAB scheduled its winter board meeting in Washington at the same time as NATPE, keeping many key station group executives tied up 3,000 miles away.

Despite Sony’s pioneering efforts, few I talked to seem to think that CES could ever be an acceptable substitute for NATPE. The business of NATPE would be overwhelmed by the sheer size and distractions of CES, they fear. (Plus, the price of hotel rooms can triple during CES.)

NAB is probably the more serious threat. The NAB comprises broadcasters and, in the end, distributors will follow the broadcasters wherever they go. But the same concerns about being lost in the crowd arise when distributors think about NAB, now fundamentally a tech show.

Because of the big studios’ waning interest and the covetous attention of CES and NAB, many were openly talking about how this year’s NATPE might be the last.

But I don’t think so.

All agree that there is a need for a gathering of buyers and sellers in the broadcast syndication business.

And it does no harm if that such gathering takes place in the larger context of convention that also addresses international, broadband, cable and tolerates pushy producers from Down Under.

In fact, it probably does a lot of good. You don’t know where the next good idea is coming from.

And what stronger endorsement does NATPE need than the ones it received from Sony and CBS. For all their squawking, in the end, they showed up.

See you next year at the Mandalay Bay—up the escalator, up course.