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.
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 …