Tribute to Fez.

It takes a long time to glue his hair and teeth back in place after he gets roused from his stupor.

It could just be a residual habit from O&A, god I miss the 12 minute Ectassy of Gold intro.

It takes 60 seconds for him to hide his child slaves.

Is it the video version, the audio version, or both?

I work on a handful of podcasts and live streams in Los Angeles, so this is just speculation.

There might be a lot of reasons, but almost all of them are due to time constraints, or possibly even laziness if Ant or KtC aren't aware of it. It's easy to cut out time off of the front of an MP3, the files are small. To cut it off of a master, you'd have to edit it and re-render the file. Even if the online version you see in the archives is compressed, he'd probably have to download it, cut it out, and re-upload it. THAT also could be a decision based on viewer counts - I don't know what service they use, it doesn't look like uStream or YouTube, but that might reset their view count, which is actually an important number when dealing with online advertisers.

I don't know what Anthony is recording in, but lets assume full HD. I've worked on full HD podcasts, and with two hours of content, that's a 80-100+ gig file, and re-rendering it to cut just a minute off of the front is a giant pain in the ass. But that's assuming they don't have a dedicated edit rig, and I have no idea how they run the backend of their archives though, so this is all (mildly) educated speculation.

I don't know what they're paying the kid, but it might be enough to justify Rat eventually sticking around for a few extra hours and cutting the minute off. Remember, they're still figuring this out. Online streaming is a tricky bitch, and TriCasters aren't exactly foolproof technology. It just doesn't make a lot of sense at the moment. As Anthony scales, they maybe add a guy in to just handle post, and then that's an easy thing to add to workflow.

TL;DR It's probably an easy, albeit time consuming edit that could be done quickly on an expensive edit rig. Or, just set the fucking video to start after the minute of silence. But what do I know?

It's laziness. They don't even stitch single shows together after a reboot.

They could probably hire another kid who comes in at 6 after the show wraps and just does post work for a couple hours, pay him a few shekels, problem solved.

Audio, yes. Video, not necessarily. The video is the thing that takes a bitch to re-render. Saving changes to an audio file doesn't take very long.

Don't forget the sixteen minutes of theme song on a loop at the end of the file.

A moment of silence while he pours one out for the homies.

I think they've automated it so that it automatically begins recording at a certain time and ends at a certain time. This is why sometimes at the end of the episode, there's like 20 minutes of dead air.

It's stupid because even the Opie and Anthony pirate posters, working for free, would edit that shit out.

It's to give any curious faggots wondering what's happening a chance to settle down and enjoy the show.