You heard it here first. 2007 will be the year mobile content moves from the digital fringe to the consumer heartland.

There are some tech trends that will help me not look like a liar this time next year -- primarily that 3G mobile networks will reach critical mass while the high-end cell phones required to tap into them see a dramatic drop in price and rise in availability. Think flawlessly streamed video without the stutters and choppiness you see today.

But the thing that will really take mobile gadgets mainstream has more to do with Hollywood than tech. 2007 will see the first Emmy’s given to video content sent over broadband to everything from computers to cell phones to iPods. Look out Kiefer Sutherland, the broadband of brothers is heading for your red carpet.

Just the notion of original content from something like Current TV competing head-to-head with network prime time shows is already moving mobile into mainstream consciousness. In reporting on the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences’ decision to accept broadband content for Emmy consideration, the LA Times ran a headline asking “A new Emmy for webisodes?”

Webisodes? Screaming from the pages of the entertainment industry’s paper of record? I know that even veterans of the tech world were amazed to see such insider jargon from mainstream media. Only a matter of time before webisodes and mobisodes become entries in Webster’s or the Oxford English.

The glitzy award recognition couldn’t come at a better time for the gawky adolescent that mobile is today as the medium tries to define itself.

Unfortunately, a lot of the early content being pumped to people’s handhelds is simply repurposed broadcast TV – not modified to fit the relatively tiny size of the “third screen” or the snippet-style viewing habits of consumers who most often cozy up with their handhelds when they don’t have anything better to do. That’s usually while waiting for a bus, riding the train to work, waiting to be picked up from soccer practice or queing up for a movie.

The idea of watching 47 minutes of your favorite TV show on your cell phone just doesn’t fly. Or how about watching a two-hour movie on your video iPod? Actually a battery doesn’t exist that can do that for an iPod without a recharge.

So less is more when it comes to mobile content. And what’s loosely called “made for mobile” should indeed only be content that’s made for the mobile medium. That’s not a criterion for winning Emmys, it’s a requirement for winning consumers as ongoing customers.

Companies like GoTV are setting the bar in mobile media, producing original content ranging from daily news and celebrity dirt to first-run mobsidoes like makeover show Primped. The only network content they run is trimmed to fit the size and sensibilities of the third screen and its viewers.

But GoTV is the exception. The sooner mainstream content providers and carriers get the gestalt of the new mobile viewer, the better chance they’ll have of participating in the mobile revolution rather than being overtaken by it.

And going mobile doesn’t stop there. Just look at the consumer-generated media phenom that is YouTube. We’re talking videos that often span seconds instead of minutes. I’ve been working on a project with the folks from MySpace who tell me they won’t run videos longer than 30 seconds on their corporate pay-to-play sites. 15 seconds is the ideal.

Forget mobisodes, how about microsodes? And the Emmy goes to…