Apple is taking the unusual step of providing live video streaming of Wednesday’s special press event in San Francisco. The event will be available to Safari users running on Mac OS X 10.6, an iPhone, iPod touch running iOS 3.0 or later or iPad.

It’s been years since Apple has attempted to stream an event live over the Internet, which has given rise to a cottage industry of live blogs during these events. Reporters use any means possible – Wi-Fi, 3G cell data connections and more – to report the events as they happen, typically with varying degrees of accuracy or completeness. Apple sometimes asks reporters to refrain from live blogging the events, but rarely takes any direct action to stop them.

During Apple’s recent event to discuss issues with iPhone 4 reception, the excess of Wi-Fi personal networks created by mobile Wi-Fi hotspots used by bloggers seemed to have contributed to Steve Jobs’ inability to connect his demo iPhone 4 to the Internet.

Apple is promoting Wednesday’s event as a showcase for HTTP Live Streaming, an HTTP-based media streaming protocol implemented by Apple as part of QuickTime. HTTP Live Streaming has been submitted to the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) as a proposed Internet standard.

The live broadcast happens at 10 AM Pacific Daylight Time on Wednesday, September 1, 2010 and will be shown at the Apple Web site.

Regardless of the live streaming, The Loop’s founder, Jim Dalrymple, is on the ground in San Francisco for the event and will bring Loop readers our usual brand of in-depth coverage and analysis.