While I agree the delay is a killer for topical news/comedy content, it's hard to argue the same for In Our Time. In Our Time is the only show I regularly listen to in podcast form.
In recent weeks they've started inserting interstitial ads for other BBC content at random points inside In Our Time.
"How can they do that, the show is an uninterrupted 45 minutes of talking" you might ask. Well, they just insert it at a random point somewhere, possibly halfway through a sentence. It's both very annoying and amateurish.
I don't know if this applies to your circumstance, but w.r.t. those m3u8 urls posted elsewhere: I have found that a lot of systems will cheerfully reference the ad-break content on some rando spammy looking domain in the middle of their otherwise sane #EXTM3U format making it cheap to just block them and the player skips over it
My suspicion is that is how uBlock Origin is able to make the YT ads magically disappear without otherwise blowing up the content stream
For IoT the one actual pain-point is that if an episode generates online discussion then I can't participate but it's mainly a complaint about the user-hostile attempt to make the podcast feed an inferior second class citizen.
It's a shame because they were so forward looking in the digital and streaming game and this feels so regressive. Beeb aren't going to get more license fee out of me because I use their feckin' app. As you say, it's not killer so why would they even bother with the pettiness? Just makes me sad really.
"How can they do that, the show is an uninterrupted 45 minutes of talking" you might ask. Well, they just insert it at a random point somewhere, possibly halfway through a sentence. It's both very annoying and amateurish.