Hacker News Reader

> It would actually be really complicated to offer just a couple of items DRM free, with lots of if/then code branches.

It's literally just an "isDrm": false in the manifest. They already do that for trailers and some extra content.

That non-DRM content is delivered by a different infrastructure that is designed for speed, so that the user has a quick experience, but that system isn't designed for full length content.

Huh, how odd.

It's not at all odd. It's very likely the same behavior as YouTube ads (which often load instantly) vs videos which need to buffer.

They're both likely special cases for content < 1 minute long that you expect 20 or 30% of visitors to see.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com