3 Group is going where few wireless carriers have gone before, offering its users the opportunity to use their mobile phones for watching cable TV. The catch (and there always is one) is that the users have to have a Slingbox installed at their home.

Slingbox is the year-old device out of California that can stream and record live video over the Internet to a laptop or handheld. The extension to the mobile is a natural one, but the move to adapting cable TV to a mobile phone environment is a new one indeed.

Users can also use their phones to control their in-home DVR, if they have one.

The U.K. will get this service first, beginning on December 1; other countries will follow early next year.