I have live TV on my iPhone. Do you?

During the election season, I was glued to CNN. I needed to catch all the commentary that went along with every stop on the trail and every move in the polls. That meant watching TV in strange places. No device is better for strange-place TV watching than your phone. The problem was, I had recently switched to my shiny new iPhone, and was pretty mad that that I couldn't access my Slingbox from it, while Apple and Sling duked it out over whether the Sling app would be released (still no updates, which can't be good). Well, I got it too late for the election season, but now I'm using Orb and it really works. Success!

Here's the deal. You need to have a computer in your house, with a TV tuner installed on it. Many desktops have been shipping with tuners for years, so your computer might have one even if you aren't using it. If not, it's easy enough to get a simple USB external TV tuner. Ideally, this is the one computer that you leave running. Once your TV tuner is installed in your computer (again, it probably already is installed), connect your standard cable-TV coax cable to your TV tuner.

That's pretty much it. Now install Orb on that computer and install OrbLive on your iPhone.

Orb takes your live TV signal and streams it out over the Internet to your Orb clients, such as a laptop running Orb software, or your phone. You can access a program guide from your phone, choose a channel, wait a frustrating 15 to 20 seconds or so, and then poof, you are watching TV on your phone from anywhere.

Unlike the YouTube app, Orblive will display TV in either the portrait or landscape mode. I like this because I use Orb in the car while I am waiting on the kids, while my phone is docked. The puts the audio on my car speakers and the TV is viewable from my seat (no, I don't drive and watch TV, and neither should you).

OrbLive can also be used to access the photos, music, and other files on your home computer (or home network) from your iPhone. It found and categorized all of my music, and allows me to play it on my iPhone (except DRM protected tracks), just as if that music was in the iPod on my phone. In my case, this isn't much use because I have the same music locally on my phone. But, I do use this feature for photos. Faced with tough choices due to the non- expandable 16GB iPhone (would a micro-SD chip have been that hard??), I took all of my home photos off of my phone to make room for music and videos. With Orb, I have fast access to my entire home photo library from anywhere, already organized into folders just like on my home machine. I can flick through the photos just like on the native photo app. This is terrific.

I can also access files on my home computers, and open documents, using the file access feature in OrbLive. This has actually come in handy.

Since your home computer can act as a DVR using Windows Media Center, you can also access recorded shows seamlessly via OrbLive. When I installed it, there were some conflict issues when Media Center wanted access to the tuner at the same time Orb wanted access to the tuner. I understand they have fixed this issue, but I've never gone back to check. I simply turned off the Media Center TV functions and never looked back. Now, I use that computer's TV tuner only for Orb.

Want to know why? The truth is, I don't use DVR functionality that much anymore. I gave my Tivo to my Mom (It's a version 1, from about 1999, and she loves it -- that says good things about the quality of Tivo's initial design, doesn't it?). I don't use MCE either. Once in a while, if I really want to record something, I use the one built into my cable box, which gives me the added benefit of High Def recording (minus hassle).

Here's why. Internet media has changed everything. Who could have guessed, just a year ago, how much commercial TV content would be freely and legally available on the web today? Now, shows are posted to the web just a couple of hours after their initial airing. And the Web is the ultimate DVR, because you don't have to be hassled with recording anything. If I want last night's The Daily Show, I simply go to Hulu, type "The Dail" and before I'm done typing, there it is. Why record stuff anymore? I have a lot more to say about Internet media, because I have dedicated the last year of my professional life to the topic with my start-up. That's another post.

This is a blog about "great consumer technology experiences," which begs the question, does Orb qualify? No, not really. It is still way too geeky. You have to like to tinker to keep a PC running as your TV server. Eventually, the Internet media future should make a solution like Orb totally unnecessary. We'll all have to wait a little longer.

Meantime, tell me about your experiences with live TV on your iPhone. But please, leave out the details of the "strange places" where you watch...