Correct me if I'm wrong. IIRC, there isn't a status code for temporary moved *with a timeout. If you use 307, it means the browser will always still check the original apple.com first, then get redirected to apple.com/live. Using 301 would make browser go to apple.com/live directly which improves response time. When the event is finished, they can do a 301 on apple.com/live back to apple.com to overwrite the rule.
Or lazy about their redirecting. 301's are supported by pretty much every browser, indexer and wget/curl whereas 302's sometimes fail on those. Its also pretty easy to reissue another 301 from /live to com/
I'm fairly certain they just want you to land on the live page, even if you can't view it in the current browser. It's about eyes on page to spur you to either stay tuned or move to a browser that works with it.
An alternative explanation to a very confident Apple is just that they changed their attitude about all this, thinking there is not really much of a difference between them providing a countdown or others doing it (before the last Keynote this countdown webpage got pretty huge), between them providing a liveblog or others doing it (there are always many liveblogs with often crappy photos, so why not shot beautiful photos and provide them directly?), unaware that would hype up the event.
I don’t think it’s that, but if they are sufficiently tone-deaf that could be the case. Apple historically hasn’t really been, definitely not when it comes to their events, but who knows …
I don't think the big deal is them providing live coverage, it's that their homepage is redirecting to the stream 24 hours before hand. Considering how many hits apple.com gets per day that's a big decision indicating a huge event.
Why a countdown? Probably because they're launching a watch. Wait and see. My guess is they hint at the why during the event, probably in the opening minute or so. They will also probably use time-based headlines in the slides.
I wonder how much outside the realms of possibility a VR headset could be...? They have patents and seem to have become more serious about 3D graphics lately. Maybe I'm just dreaming though. Maybe a wearable could be something to allow an iPhone/iPod type device to function as headset?
