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Livestation to Bring Live TV to the iPhone/iPod touch

On Thursday, Livestation, a service that offers peer-to-peer streaming from major broadcasters will announce a development application for the iPhone/iPod touch that aims to bring live TV to these devices.

TechCrunch UK reports that the heavily funded operation has recently announced plans to offer an iPhone/iPod touch application that promises to deliver streaming Television to your device. While this certainly sounds intriguing and was easily able to capture my attention, there is an interesting twist to this tale. In 2006 Microsoft had inked an equity deal with Skinkers, the developers of Livestation, a first for the Microsoft in Europe at such time. What this means is that now Microsoft will have an associated interest in delivering live streaming TV to the iPhone. Isn’t it ironic. Don’t you think?

Once the app is made available it will only work via WiFi, for the time being. Skinkers CEO Matteo Berlucchi, is set to be online in a Livestation chat room to answer questions about the upcoming application, but if you would like instant gratification of seeing of in action now, check the video below.

Livestation will not be the first to offer streaming content to these devices, as Orb had announced an official application to do just that. However, it required the use of pricey software that must be downloaded to a PC to work. Kind of lame if you ask me. If Livestation can properly stream live TV to the iPhone/iPod touch this will be an application to look out for. As TUAW points out, with the expanding popularity of video streaming sites like Hulu and Netflix streaming service, there is no doubt that media is trending in this direction, making it all the more reasonable to assume that we will be seeing this functionality on mobile devices in the near future.