Brace yourself for real-time iPhone broadcasting.

Ustream Broadcaster has set the stage with an app that enables iPhone users to stream live content online, onto mobile phones or upload video to social media sites.

Live broadcasting is just the latest iPhone innovation as writers, producers and actors increasingly see their digital content land on iPhone apps and other mobile platforms.

Fuelling the mobile boom are new communications handsets to challenge RIM’s BlackBerry dominance, with more multimedia features and more intuitive and flashy uses from smartphone competitors Apple and Palm.

Warren Currell, CEO of Toronto-based Sherpa Games, sees the iPhone as a miniature console for even the most sophisticated video games. He points to a game he reps, Electronic Arts’ Need for Speed Undercover, available at Apple’s App Store for $6.99. Currell taps the iPhone screen to speed up or slow down the game play, and tips the phone rightwards and leftwards to steer as an on-screen car pursues street racers and chop shop gangs.

‘The graphics and animation flow is pretty impressive, like a PC screen but smaller,’ Currell says.

With the number of iPhone apps having surpassed 100,000, digital producers have an uphill battle to penetrate a crowded mobile content market.

Still, as data speeds and content quality improve, producers expect demand for affordable mobile content to grow among smartphone users.

FlixFling from Invincible Pictures is another next-generation iPhone application that allows users to stream or download films to their phone, which in turn can be directed to their TV for DVD-quality viewing.

Mobile apps are also connecting companies to consumers, once the domain of traditional media.

Toronto-based mobile media shop MyThum Interactive developed a mobile message service for a Rogers/MTV-branded Leak Live concert tour to push the broadcasters’ brands.

‘Kids can’t talk at a concert, but they can text, tweet, surf, use chat rooms, video blog,’ MyThum CEO Michael Carter explains.

So far in the mobile video space, iPhone is the fun and hip draw for apps and video display, with the rumored Google Nexus One phone stirring geek interest. Higher-end BlackBerry phones like the Bold, Curve and Storm models, on the other hand, remain superior for their business applications, and lag in serving entertainment and gaming apps.

Also key to success for content producers nowadays is having a recognized brand with compelling content for mobile consumers.

The National Film Board, for example, launched a mobile app to allow Canadians to download and view for free an initial 800 documentaries, animated films and trailers.

Deborah Drisdell, the NFB’s director general of accessibility and digital enterprises, says the mobile app is proof the public filmmaker is embracing new digital platforms.

‘[Canadians] have access to these treasures of our history with recent and older films, and they can share them with their friends or send an e-mail link. It’s a different way of consuming content, and one people find compelling,’ she says.

Some 22 million Canadians use their mobile devices daily to communicate. That’s a big market to mine.

Then there’s the cost of video streaming on the mobile platform. It can really eat up bandwith as part of smartphone data plans.

Rogers will broaden its video portal Rogers On Demand Online (RODO) to a mobile app in spring 2010, and estimates a 45-minute video streamed on a phone will use between 400 and 500 megabytes of bandwidth.

That’s a problem for heavy users of online video. Rogers isn’t saying whether RODO going mobile will include monitoring technology to let subscribers know when they’re near their bandwidth cap and risking additional mobile bandwidth fees.

The bonus to Rogers, however, is mobile subscribers who exceed their bandwith cap streaming online video can be upsold on bigger data packages.