A few brief moments ago, Apple issued an official press release stating that it will broadcast its September 1st music-centric event online using industry-leaving live HTTP streaming based on open standards. This marks one of the few exceptional times that the company has opened up to the idea of live streaming a video broadcast of a major industry announcement.

The live stream, based on "open standards," is ironically restricted to those using a Mac running Safari on Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, an iPhone or iPod touch running iOS 3.0 or higher, or an iPad. In essence, the company wants to ensure that only consumers who have recently invested in the company's products have access to the video stream, thereby leaving Windows, Linux, Unix, and a variety of other smartphone OS users out of luck.

"This broadcast is the property of Apple and is protected by US copyright law and international treaties. Any reproduction or distribution is strictly prohibited without prior written approval from Apple. Please contact Apple Public Relations with any questions."

For those who don't mind reading live streams of boring text, several industry-leading hardware sites will be providing live up-to-the-second blogs of the material presented at Apple's "special event" in San Francisco, California. A few of the notable live text blogs include ArsTechnica, Engadget, gdgt and The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW).

In the meantime, Gizmodo has published a list of expectations and speculation around the announcements that will proceed at Apple's music-themed event. The live video broadcast commences on Wednesday, September 1, 2010 at 10:00am PST.