No there aren’t. There are no benefits to the stations for this switch.
Will they receive more ad revenue? Nope. Same ads. Same sponsors. IF (and ONLY if) everything went smoothly, they’d have exactly the same number of eyeballs watching their crappy programming, from which they derive the rates for their advertising.
But... here’s the reality: across huge chunks of the US, TV stations operate remote translators/repeaters to relay their signal to remote/rural audiences. These transmitters, by and large, have been given a much larger window of time to convert. Many of them probably won’t ever convert. If they’re given an edict “Convert to DTV... or else!” a lot of these translators will take the “or else” option and go dark.
Meaning fewer eyeballs, which means reduced ad revenue.
There are plenty of people in rural areas who aren’t buying DTV-ready sets, because their transmitters (the aforementioned translators) aren’t digital now, aren’t about to be digital in the future and the majority of any improvement in their situation comes from going to satellite and calling it done. That’s yet more potential revenue for the terrestrial stations lost.
The whole of the DTV conversion was so absurdly ill-planned that it took until the middle of last year for converter boxes with analog pass-through to start appearing. If they really wanted to make this conversion as seamless as possible, they would have had mandated converter boxes have an analog/NTSC pass-through to minimize the hassle for users from the start. But they didn’t. They would have addressed the rural/low-power/non-profit station issue, but they didn’t.
Will they receive more ad revenue? Nope. Same ads. Same sponsors. IF (and ONLY if) everything went smoothly, they’d have exactly the same number of eyeballs watching their crappy programming, from which they derive the rates for their advertising.
They can broadcast 1 HDTV signal and 1 Standard Definition TV (SDTV) signal simultaneously, or they can transmit 5 SDTV signals simultaneously. There will be opportunities to target different markets simultaneously.