You don't need Steve Jobs' permission to watch TV on your iPhone any more. A native Orb client for the iPhone and iPod Touch popped up on the installer networks overnight, and Orb confirms that it's official.

The client software allows you to watch live TV on an iPhone or Touch wherever you are, in addition to your music. You'll need a TV card or adaptor for your PC, of course, to get the live TV. So provided you have an internet connection, there's no need to perform DIY transcoding using software such as Visual Hub. The client will even transcode the video stream nicely for 2.75G Edge networks. Orb does in software what Sling Media does in hardware.

One of the drawbacks of the iPhone/Touch is the narrow choice of supported video formats - a strange omission in what is the best personal media player on the market. But then it's not so strange when you consider Apple's ambitions to sell you TV shows and movies - which you've already paid for with your cable subscription.

Orb effectively fixes this problem, as the transcoding is performed "in the cloud" transparently.

And it looks a bit like this: