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It may not be the best of times for digital outdoor, but it is not exactly the worst of times either.

The big players have all endured painful second quarters – with revenue down 27 percent at CBS Outdoor, 15 percent at Lamar and 13 percent at JCDecaux, while Clear Channel Outdoor’s figures, due later today, are deeply unlikely to buck the trend.

Yet digital remains a bright spot, and it’s becoming almost routine for outdoor firms to identify digital and emerging markets as their strongest hopes for the future.

At CBS, for example, president and CEO Leslie Moonves says “we believe outdoor will perform well over the long term, especially the investments we made in digital boards and emerging international markets”.

Meanwhile, the new medium’s share of (admittedly heavily trimmed) capex at Lamar has continued to grow over the last year and the company is now investing roughly twice as much in digital billboards as in their conventional counterparts. In the same long term referred to by Moonves, this is far more significant than the revenue dip.

In the U.S., particularly, the future of digital billboards is still clouded by the long-running rows over traffic safety and visual pollution. But what seems pretty clear from the attitude of the media owners is that digital is not going to go away, and it is unrealistic to think that those arguments will provoke anything like a full-blown retreat.

Most likely, a consensus will emerge that will answer the qualms of the anti-billboard campaigners as well as meeting the commercial requirements of the outdoor firms and their advertisers. Ironing out the details will be tough, but it will happen, and indeed it may well be that the arguments that rage today are not really about whether digital continues to exist, but only about the details.

And in any case, the U.S. is not the only market. Wait for this slump to end, and we will suddenly see digital billboards transformed from interesting innovations (not to mention money pits) into the main long-term business of the big outdoor firms.