On Monday, Roku chief executive Anthony Wood told Business Insider’s Dan Frommer that the company expects to sell its millionth Roku box by the end of this year, two and a half years after the first devices launched. He also said that when Apple TV arrived, Roku sales doubled thanks to heightened awareness of streaming set-top boxes. (Preemptive price cuts couldn’t have hurt.)

On Tuesday, Apple put out a press release crowing about sales of Apple TV. The company expects new Apple TV sales to hit 1 million later this week, and noted that iTunes users are renting and purchasing more than 400,000 TV shows and 150,000 movies per day. For comparison, the original iPhone took 74 days to hit 1 million sales, while Apple TV will take, at most, 86 days to reach the same milestone this week.

Obviously, Apple TV is beating Roku. That was to be expected given Apple’s reputation and retail presence. Still, the 1 million sales mark is a good sign for any gadget, and both boxes are getting there.

I don’t know how many of those set-top boxes are being used to replace subscription TV outright — probably not many — but if Apple TV and Roku get into more homes, the odds of cable-cutting are only going to increase.

For now, content owners and cable companies maintain that cord-cutting is a minor phenomenon, limited mostly to middle-aged, middle-class people who don’t stream a lot of media, not the tech-savvy geeks you might expect. This observation will lose validity if set-top boxes go mainstream.

Now that Roku’s out and Apple TV is just about here, the next big questions for this category all rotate around Google TV and the Boxee Box–both of which aim for a more feature-packed, comprehensive approach to Internet TV than the keep-it-simple-and-cheap Roku and Apple TV. I hope to try ‘em all before the holidays are here.

I met with Boxee CEO Avner Ronen and D-Link Director of Consumer Marketing Brent Collins this weekend to get a sneak peek of a nearly-final Boxee Box. And you know what? Despite the avalanche of competition it’ll face, it still looks pretty cool.

The two companies are releasing some new tidbits about the Box today. They say the $200 gizmo will ship on schedule in November, and that they’re taking pre-orders via Amazon.com starting today. (Amazon buyers will get their Boxes a week before other folks.)

More surprising: The Box will be powered by an Intel Atom CE4100 processor. That’s news because the original version that Boxee showed off packed an Nvidia Tegra 2. The silicon switcheroo helps to explain why the Box will reach TV fans later than Boxee and D-Link originally expected. And Ronen told me that it will enable the Box to comfortably play 1080p video–stuff that’s stored on a home network at first, and streaming 1080p from online sources as it becomes available.

The Boxee Box will sport both 802.11n wireless and Ethernet networking, and will come with an RF remote control with a QWERTY keyboard on its backside. The software is similar to Boxee’s clients for Windows, the Mac, and Linux, and includes a built-in WebKit browser and Flash support which give it the technical chops to play back nearly all the video the Web has to offer. As always, the user interface looks fresh and fun, if a bit dense with options.

Boxee recently announced that it’s partnering with four online movie stores to bring films to the Box, and it has relationships in place with Internet video powerhouses such as Revision3. But it’s still not entirely clear what services will be baked into the Box when it ships in November. The Box I saw today appeared to support Hulu, but it’ll be a miracle (and at odds with history) if Hulu doesn’t try to block it. And when I asked about Netflix Watch Instantly, Ronen told me that Boxee and D-Link “werent demoing” that service, and that the companies would have more news about built-in services before the Box hits stores. (Here’s hoping it’s good news.)

I’m still trying to make up my mind about the Boxee Box’s attractive-but-idiosyncratic industrial design. It’s entertaining for sure–but when it comes to set-top boxes, entertainment value is less critical than convenience. The Box is a surprisingly tall little guy by current Internet-TV-box standards, and it won’t fit into a stack of living-room components. (If there’s a second-generation Box, I wouldn’t be startled if it’s a tad more orthodox in shape.)

The Box will obviously get lumped in with the new Apple TV–hey, I did it earlier in this post–but the two gadgets’ approaches to Internet TV are as different as they are similar. Apple’s box offers Netflix, iTunes rentals, YouTube, and streaming from iOS devices for $99, at a maximum resolution of 720p with a typically stripped-down interface and remote. The $199 Boxee Box, by contrast, does 1080p, plays an array of video formats for content stored on home networks, pulls in online video and audio from all over the Web, has apps for Web services such as Pandora, and has a rich array of options and a QWERTY remote. It’s unquestionably a much geekier device than Apple TV, but the pricetag doesn’t seem irrational if you are indeed a geek.

It’s Google TV that looks like a more direct counterpart to Boxee: Both platforms aim to bring a profusion of Web video into the living room via WebKit browsers and Flash support, for instance, and both promise fancier remote controls than Apple’s minimalist model. But it’s tough to say how Boxee compares to Google TV devices such as Logitech’s Revue until every detail is known and they’re both available for testing.

Me, I’m most dependent on two Internet TV boxes: a Roku (which resembles Apple TV more than it does Boxee) and a TiVo HD (which provides access to Amazon Video on Demand, Netflix, and other services). I’m looking forward to trying some of the new contenders before the year is out. This is the first holiday season that I can imagine multiple new Internet TV boxes being hits…and even though the Boxee Box won’t sell in Apple TV-like numbers, I could see it doing quite well.

I’m sorry I wasn’t at Apple’s music event today to cover it live. I had fun watching it via Apple’s live video stream from the lobby bar here at the Grand Hyatt in Berlin, though. (I give the experience a B- from a technical standpoint: Eighty percent of the time, the stream worked well, fifteen percent I got audio but the picture froze, five percent it misbehaved in other ways. Then again, I was on iffy hotel Wi-Fi, so the glitchiness might have been on my end rather than Apple’s.)

Just about all of today’s news turned out to be less than dramatic: It was expected (the new iPod Touch) or less radical than the rumors had it (the new Apple TV) or involved minor products (the Shuffle and Nano). But as usual, I’m left asking questions about the upshot of the morning’s announcements. Such as:

Is the main message of the new Nano that the old Nano was irrelevant? It’s basically got two new features: It’s way small and it has a touch-screen interface. But it has a smaller screen than its predecessor (1.54″ vs. 2.2″). It doesn’t have a camera anymore (looks like it’s official that the camera-enabled Nano never killed the Flip). I assume it can’t play video. The pedometer is presumably gone. It’s essentially a different device–more like a Shuffle with a screen than a more fully-evolved Nano. If you want video and a camera, Apple is saying, buy an iPod Touch–a larger, pricier, more complex gadget. It’s logical advice for a lot of people, but is there nobody left who wants a fairly feature-rich iPod with the simplicity of the old interface?

Is the new Nano an iOS device? It has an iOS-like skin, and Jobs seemed to call it an iOS-based product when he referred to “other” iOS devices. But he never addressed the issue explicitly. Of course,the Nano’s OS only matters if Apple lets developers write Nano-compatible apps–which sounds like it might involve a lot of complexity without that much payoff.

What explains the iPod Shuffle’s evolution/devolution? I kind of liked the buttonless, voice-controlled version, but I apparently didn’t have much company. The new square Shuffle is an improved version of the Shuffle before the last one, retaining the last one’s voice control as an option but abandoning everything else about it. I’m trying to think of other examples of Apple, or anyone else, taking a detour like the last Shuffle before.

Is the iPod Classic a non-product? Steve Jobs said that Apple was updating all the iPods, and then didn’t mention the poor Classic–which left me thinking it was a goner. But it’s still in the lineup, in unchanged form. Will the last iPod with the original iconic click wheel design ever get a meaningful upgrade? Will it still be in the lineup one year from now?

Does Ping have anything to do with Lala? I still miss the brilliant music service which was bought and shuttered by Apple, and wonder whether parts of it will return, in one form or another, as Apple products. Among Lala’s features were social network-like aspects that let you friend people and see what they were listening to–similar, in broad concept, to iTunes’ new Ping features. Is Ping just vaguely Lala-like, or is does it really represent the return of (part of) Lala?

Does Ping show Apple wants to be a social-networking powerhouse? Sure, there have been features in Apple products which flirted with being social for years. But Ping is something new: a full-blown attempt to turn millions of iTunes users into one of the world’s largest social networks. During the event, I tweeted that there’s a war between Ping, Facebook, and Gmail brewing. I was joking–but if the version of Ping which Apple announced today is just the start of the company’s social ambitions, it involves new competitive fronts for sure.

Is Ping a bad idea? Hey, I’m not saying it is–in fact, it gets my vote as today’s most interesting news, by quite a lot. But people already complain that iTunes is too bloated and unfocused. And the notion of doing Facebook/Twitter-like social networking in an application rather than on the Web sounds a tad odd. I’m looking forward to trying it out and forming opinions one way or the other.

Is the new Apple TV more than a hobby? Apple has been ratcheting down expectations for the original Apple TV almost from the moment it released it, saying it’s just a hobby and that’s not selling particularly well. The new version represents a major rethinking of the hardware (it’s tiny and diskless) and offers new services and features (cheap HP TV downloads, Airplay streaming from iOS devices). There’s nothing strikingly innovative about the new Apple TV, though-at best, it looks like a nice rival to the very similar device known as Roku. (Google TV, which is designed to play all the video on the Web, looks more inventive.) Still, with Apple behind it, there’s a chance that the new Apple TV will be a game-changing breakout hit. I guess we’ll know if Steve Jobs starts quoting sales figures rather than disparaging the whole idea.

What happened to the idea of an Apple TV App Store? It was a cool idea. There may be iOS lurking somewhere within the new Apple TV, but Jobs didn’t say so, and it’s clear that the new one won’t run third-party software–at least not right now. Is this model an intermediary step on the road to an app-enabled Apple TV?

Can they make November come a little quicker? I’m really anxious to get iOS 4.2, which finally brings multitasking, folders, and the rest of the goodness of iOS 4 to the iPad.

Any answers to any of the above musings? Any additional questions of your own?

Engadget’s got some more rumors on the project, which will reportedly be dubbed iTV when it’s revealed this fall. We previously heard that Apple was slimming down the television set-top with iPhone-like specs, including an A4 processor and 16 GB of flash memory. Now, Josh Topolsky’s unnamed tipster says iTV will definitely support apps. Whether they’ll be iTV originals or iPhone/iPad converts is unknown.

Apps aside, the iTV will reportedly make use of new streaming media features in iTunes (maybe the same ones the Lala team is rumored to be working on). But Engadget says that after some infighting, Apple settled on 720p instead of 1080p, due to processor limitations.

I don’t think the apps or the resolution matter much. If the iTV is real, as Engadget describes it, the truly killer feature will be its $99 price tag. At that price, Apple could pitch iTV as a cheap and easy way to connect iTunes with a television, either by streaming or loading them onto the device. That was the original goal of Apple TV, but at $229, it’s harder to justify a bulky box with only one intended purpose. A $100 iPhone-size device is a different story altogether, and the presence of apps — a marketing hook that has worked well for Apple so far — would only sweeten the deal.

Would it be as deliberate an attempt at revolution as Google TV? No, but you can’t underestimate the power of iTunes, which by 2007 had more than 500 million users.  If any meaningful percentage of those people use iTunes to download videos, iTV will be a hit, as long as it’s real.

Apple TV 3.0 has a redesigned main menu that adds shortcuts to recently rented or purchased movies. TV shows, music, podcasts, photos and YouTube are also front and center.

In addition, iTunes extras and iTunes LP content can now be played on the Apple TV in full screen. Genius mixes and Internet radio can now be played through home theater systems. The iTunes upgrade adds HE-AAC playback and encoding.

I still wonder when Apple will start a subscription service. For the moment, my colleague Harry McCracken has largely forsaken his Apple TV for a Roku, because his Roku gives him unlimited content through Netflix.

Apple TV is a nice device, but it is not, as Harry has stated, “an iPod-like transcendent hit.” I’m sure it would work well paired with one of those snazzy new 27″ iMacs, but very little (other than iTunes synchronization) differentiates Apple TV from its competitors. How about it, Steve?

There has been rumors abound about Apple getting into the TV business, and selling an all-in-one unit. I would be happy to forsake a box for a TV that has Apple software built in. My tiny Manhattan living room doesn’t have much space for more stuff.

Apple TV 3.0 is a free download for existing customers; new 160GB units cost $229. Last month, Apple slashed the Apple TV’s price, and increased capacity.

Depending on how you use Apple TV, you might or might not find the 4X jump in capacity for your buck to be a boon–if all you do is rent the occasional movie, store a typical music collection, and stream stuff from other computers around your house, 40GB was plenty. 160GB starts to sound like enough space for a sizable movie collection (although it’s still teensy compared to the space offered by pricier media services such as HP’s MediaSmart Home Server.)

Apple TV is a fun and well-designed product, but it hasn’t turned out to be an iPod-like transcendent hit. Then again, neither has anything else involving bringing the Internet into the living room. I find myself using Roku’s $99 box more than Apple TV, mostly because its Netflix Watch Instantly integration lets it provide all-you-can-view access to a ton of content for one low price. Other than video podcasts, most of Apple TV’s content is priced per title, making it impractical to gorge on movies and TVs as you can do with Roku. I wonder if Apple has ever considered offering some sort of Netflix-like subscription plan, at least for a subset of stuff?

Time for a T-Poll: