AMSTERDAM — Among a panel of content production experts at IBC — Europe's largest broadcast technology conference — who face the challenge of adapting movies, TV and sound to the "explosion" of new delivery networks and new audio/video devices — including portable media players, mobile phones and in-car mobile TV — one used the word "amazing," another called it "kind of tricky" and one just said, "Absurd."

The keynote of the problem-solving session was the McLuhanesque assertion by Eric Pohl, Principal Consultant at National TeleConsultants in the U.S. that "the medium is the message."

"If viewers move to new platforms, your content and brand has to be on these platforms," he said. "It's very important that the content be appropriate for the medium of distribution. The medium will have a significant impact on defining the message."

As an example of the impact of these new media platforms, Pohl suggested that Hollywood studios will need "medium producers" to assure that films, while still being made, will be adaptable for viewing on everything from giant outdoor video displays to postage-stamp cell-phone screens. Picture Oliver Stone, while filming his latest movie, forced to get script approval — for every shot — from Steve Jobs.

Typical of the difficulties content makers face is the adaptation of sound, according to Ioan Allen, Senior Vice President at Dolby Labs. Allen waxed nostalgic about the first generation of sound-mixing, for movies in theaters, which required only one — monaural — mix. By the late 1990s, the number of mixes needed to provide stereo, Dolby and other effects in various media, including cinema, television (standard and high definition) and video playback, had escalated the mix demand to five or six.

But new requirements for as many as 16 different mixes, going into theaters, TV, playback devices, PCs and Macs and a plethora of handheld devices with tiny screens and tinny speakers, is a daunting problem for sound engineers, said Allen. And it's definitely counterintuitive.

Engineers have, for 60 years, striven to make sounder bigger and more awesome. The new objective, however, is to scale down the audio, sometimes through a "dynamic" process that fluctuates from scene to scene. Dolby 6.1, said Allen, is now capable of a 360-degree "stereo image," large enough to shake the seats in a Cinemax auditorium.

But the typical mobile phone screen has a practical viewing space — or "subtended viewing angle" — of 10 degrees. To try to match a Dolby 6.1 movie with a cell-phone, without a lot of downscaling and re-mixing, would be ridiculous.

Among the concerns shared at the IBC session was the prediction by Jim Guerard, Vice President for Web and Video at Adobe Systems, that content production for small devices and for a younger consumer based accustomed to the sort of interactivity common in video games, will require artists and producers to devise a "different sort of storytelling."

It is just such an expectation, said Pohl, of National TeleConsultants, that has spawned the unfortunate buzzword, "mobisodes," or "mobile episodes."

Steve Oeteggen, an Executive Vice President at security company Verimatrix (San Diego, Calif.), posed the additional specter of massive content theft through mobile devices. He warned that, at minimum, every new video product will have to be electronically "watermarked," from the earliest production stages " another headache for Oliver Stone.

"At the time of creation," said Pohl, "we have to create content that considers the characteristics of all downstream platforms." But he added that this has yet to be done and it won't be easy, a challenge that he tossed to all the engineers in the audience.