All television sets sold in the past four or five years are equipped to receive digital signals, and cable and satellite systems also use digital technology. But people with older analog sets – who tend to be older or lower-income people – or those who use their old analog TV sets in secondary household locations, will need a converter box. There's a government (i.e., taxpayer-funded) program that provides a $40 coupon to help pay for converter boxes. But John Podesta, co-chairman of President Obama's transition team, says the program has not kept pace with demand, and some 2 million people are now on a waiting list for coupons. Thus the pressure to delay the conversion date.
Given that the conversion date has been delayed several times already, and it costs TV stations to send out both analog and digital signals, which they are doing now, the best bet, despite the fact that there will be a few problems, is probably not to delay the conversion date again.
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.