Inside Move
Eye lets it ride with affils
With the Eye coming off its first primetime household ratings win in five years -- and nobody at the network level threatening to slash compensation payments, launch a soap opera channel or sell same-week repeats of "Everybody Loves Raymond" to Comedy Central -- CBS station owners are a generally happy lot.
Adding to the shiny, happy atmosphere: While the other cost-cutting webs this year are having their meetings at drab hotels like the Century Plaza in L.A. (ABC) or the Sheraton here in Gotham (NBC last month), CBS is hosting its confab at the luxurious new Bellagio on the Strip.
About the only possible cloud on the horizon for the Eye is the net's soon-to-be relaunched ayemcast, to be anchored by Bryant Gumbel and exec produced by morning pro Steve Friedman. While stations are happy that the net is soaking so many resources into a traditional trouble spot, not all are keen on giving back nearly an hour of program time to the network so that the new CBS breakfast show can once again become a full two-hour national broadcast like "Today" and "Good Morning America."
Gumbel and CBS News topper Andrew Heyward will be in Las Vegas to pitch the show, however, and insiders predict that the Eye should have significant clearance for the program by the time it launches in November. Helping matters is the fact that CBS will likely let stations keep the same number of local ad spots on the new show they've had.
