Earlier this month, entertainment industry executives gathered in Los Angeles to debate the future of content distributed over the mobile phone. Despite the wide-ranging views the various movie studios, record labels and Internet companies aired at the first-annual Demxpo, they all seemed to agree that the mobile phone is the next big medium for delivering their content.

Under contention was what form that content would take — whether it should be spun in the model of existing TV shows, games and other content, or if it should take on a new shape all its own.

In the last week, mobile content has been big news. Verizon Wireless announced it would be the first carrier to commercially deploy multicast TV over the handset, using Qualcomm's forward link only (FLO) network. CBS made is first foray onto the handset, offering clips from TV shows like “CSI” over Sprint's network. ABC bolstered its hand-held TV presence with its first original mobisode, a spinoff of its hit series “Lost.”

Perhaps most significant for the content industry, however, was last Thursday's news that video game giant Electronic Arts is buying mobile game publisher Jamdat, a deal that would bring EA's reams of licensed content and countless development dollars into the burgeoning wireless gaming space.

Despite the activity of late, the entertainment and wireless industries haven't yet come to a consensus in the content debate. Although everyone seems to agree that mobile content will eventually evolve into a unique medium with unique content, a control question remains during the interim period, in which the two industries are trying to popularize the idea of the phone as multimedia device: Should they recreate the experience of the TV, silver screen or gaming console on a 2-inch-by-2-inch screen, or should they embrace the medium as an entirely new format with unique capabilities and limitations?

At Demxpo, entertainment industry leaders drilled home their view that mobile multimedia — whether music, games or video — cannot be merely the same or repurposed content from traditional formats. Mobile TV must be shot for the small-screen format and face more stringent time limitations. Games not only have to be developed for the phone's inferior graphical and processing abilities but also create a more intense gaming experience in a much shorter amount of time.

Delivering the keynote at Demxpo, Disney/ABC Television Group President Anne Sweeney proposed that mobile TV content could be both original and familiar at the same time. ABC's new “Lost” mobisode deals with the story as its TV show, but it delivers new programming to the viewers, supporting the plot of the show without detracting from it, she says. In “Lost,” a plane crashes on an uninhabited island where the survivors fight each other and mysterious forces to survive. Instead of creating a spinoff show from the popular series, the mobisode tells the story of minor characters in the show, many of who died in the plane crash. But Sweeney said every mobile TV show doesn't necessarily have to be original programming. Other formats, like its news and sports programming, obviously lend themselves to repurposed content, and not all drama or comedy programming would necessarily generate an original mobisode.

“For certain shows, selling clips would be the right approach,” Sweeney said.

Although shows like “Lost” and Fox Entertainment's mobisode spinoff of “24” make sense in premium content models, they may be the exceptions to the rule if mobile TV truly takes off. Qualcomm's MediaFLO network will be airing dozens of real-time channels, several of them 24 hours a day. There's no way the entertainment industry or the wireless industry could create that much original programming or even optimize repurposed programming to fill that much airtime, said Rob Chandhok, vice president of engineering for MediaFLO. While unique video content will eventually make its way on the network, most of what the first-generation viewers of wireless TV will see is exactly what they see on their TV screens at home, he said.

“When they televise the World Series, they're not going to do a separate production stream for the mobile phone — at least not today,” Chandhok said. “Content providers are going to make custom content for the mobile environment when there's a business for it. There's going to be a transition.”

Although Qualcomm's network hasn't yet launched its FLO network, MobiTV has actually built a successful business model around exactly what Chandhok described. Running over unicast data networks in Europe and the U.S., MobiTV has built up a huge subscriber base by broadcasting live streams from MSNBC, ESPN and other channels — commercials and all. But Dave Whetstone, MobiTV chief marketing officer, said that although customers are attracted to MobiTV because of the big-name TV brands, many of them end up watching the service's original made-for-mobile content such as its Comedy Time channel.

“Big brands draw people to MobiTV, but they aren't necessarily what people watch,” Whetstone said.

Even MobiTV does some post-production work on programming that goes over its feed, such as making on-screen titles more legible on such a small-format screen. MobiTV competitor GoTV goes one step further, doing editing and post-production work on most everything that comes over its content network. In fact, GoTV has created what amounts to the industry's first studio dedicated to mobile content, said Elizabeth Brooks, senior vice president of marketing for GoTV. Performing post-production work to optimize content for the mobile screen is not the arduous process many make it out to be, Brooks said. GoTV's producers edit and reformat content for their news channel partners almost in real-time.

“We can rip a feed, edit it and put it up on the cell phone in five minutes,” she said. “I've literally got a newsroom in the office.”