Apple iTV? Kinect TV? Get ready for a living-room brawl.

So is this the real deal? Well, possibly, although as plenty of tech pundits have scrambled to point out, an Apple iTV is far from a guaranteed success. Consider, for instance, the sheer amount of cheap, powerful television sets being produced today. Whereas Apple created its own product categories with the iPod and iPad, with the iTV, they would be vying against a cadre of established, well-entrenched players. 

"I’m not saying that Apple should give up on a television product," Scott Raymond of ZDNet wrote recently. "I simply think that they should focus on an expanded product built on the existing Apple TV platform. Make it bigger. Add [recording] capabilities. Put Siri in it. Then allow it to be plugged into a TV of our own choosing. The market for televisions is huge because there are so many different categories that consumers want, based on size, location, affordability, and so forth."

In an interesting wrinkle, if an iTV does arrive next year, it might vie against a similar product from Microsoft. Last week, Matt Hickey of the Daily reported that Microsoft was actively seeking to incorporate its Kinect motion-sensing technology into a new television set, possibly with the help of Vizio and Sony. 

"A Kinect-enabled TV would most likely network with local PCs running the next version of Windows and also allow for gesture-based TV control (think: waving your arm to turn the set off)," Hickey wrote. So Microsoft ropes in Vizio and Sony, and Apple ropes in Sharp, and Microsoft and Apple go head to head in a next-generation-TV-set-Battle-Royale. Sounds like fun. 

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