Television station owners have discovered the Web and are now trying to reinvent themselves as sexy, local online advertising plays.

On Monday, Hearst-Argyle (HTV), which owns 26 stations affiliated primarily with Disney’s (DIS) ABC, GE’s (GE) NBC and CBS (CBS) across the U.S., announced a revenue sharing agreement with Google’s (GOOG) YouTube. Hearst-Argyle stations in Boston, Manchester, N.H., Sacramento, Pittsburgh and Baltimore will post video content to channels dedicated for these local affiliates on YouTube.

Not to be outdone, local TV owner LIN TV (TVL), which owns 29 stations nationwide, announced a partnership on Wednesday with VMIX, a privately held online video hosting company. VMIX will help LIN TV set up user-generated videos, photos blogs and other local community content on the Web sites for all of the company’s stations.

This ball began rolling last summer when the major broadcast networks struck digital deals with their affiliates to distribute content online and share some of the revenue that the networks get from online broadcasts.

And the embracing of user-generated content comes at an interesting time for local TV station operators. LIN TV announced last month that it was considering a sale of the company. Fellow local TV owner Nexstar Broadcasting (NXST) also put itself on the block last month.

So it behooves the local station owners to prove to Wall Street and prospective buyers that they have a bright future ahead of them thanks to broadband video.

As such, VMIX chief executive officer Greg Kostello said that his company is in discussions with other station owners about user-generated video deals. The company already has a similar user-generated agreement with Media General, which owns both newspapers and local TV stations.

“People do want to get more community and local news. We often care more about what’s going on down the street than across the nation. That’s just human nature,” said Kostello.

Robb Richter, the vice president of Internet for LIN TV, said Tuesday that it is extremely important for TV station owners to emphasize user-generated content about their respective communities. After all, many of the national networks already have national news and broadband video players that feature popular shows on the network. So if someone is going to come to say, the Web site of a local Fox affiliate, odds are it’s not to catch a rerun of “24″ but to get news about the place where they live.

“We want to own the local advertising market and be a community destination. That is the number one thing out there for a local TV station owner,” said Richter.

One analyst who covers the local TV station operators said that it will be crucial for companies like Hearst-Argyle and LIN TV to try and cash in on the online video craze.

“The station owners can create something of value with local content and gives them another potential revenue stream. There has been some concern about continuing viability of local affiliates,” said James Goss, an analyst with Barrington Research.

Goss added that having more relatively evergreen user-generated content on their stations’ sites could also help to mitigate the highly cyclical nature of the local TV business, which tends to rely heavily on political advertising.

But another analyst, David Bank of RBC Capital Markets, said it is still not clear if local online video advertising will be enough to make up for the fact that more and more people seem to be turning off the boob tube. For this reason, he thinks that other local station operators are still wary of the Web.

“The conflict becomes do you make enough off of online ad revenue to offset the viewers you are taking away from the offline broadcasts. We don’t know the answer to that yet and I think that’s why a lot of TV station operators are still moving slowly online,” Bank said.

Nonetheless, it’s clear that local station owners can’t ignore the Internet entirely. So Hearst-Argyle and LIN TV should be applauded for being more aggressive than their rivals.