We've heard from quite a number of you that you've found the Top/Trending tables in our Television Explorer to be extremely useful, especially for comparing how the major networks are covering the big stories of the day and what the major moving stories overall are. However, one top request has been the ability to download those tables in JSON format and especially to be able to look at them over time.

Towards this end, we're happy to announce today that we are now generating a JSON file every 15 minutes that records all of these tables into a single file and archiving them so moving forward you will be able to look back over time at what was trending in 15 minute increments historically back to midnight this morning.

The filename is of the format "http://data.gdeltproject.org/gdeltv3/iatv_trending/YYYYMMDDHHMMSS.tvtrending.v3.15min.json" at 15 minute resolution, meaning SS is always 00 and MM is either 00, 15, 30 or 45. Thus, the URL of the very first file is "http://data.gdeltproject.org/gdeltv3/iatv_trending/20170907130000.tvtrending.v3.15min.json".

Note that the files are generated every 15 minutes based on the television shows that have completed processing at that time. It can take several hours for a show to be fully processed by the Internet Archive and available for processing, thus the presence/absence of a topic in these files should not be used to date it precisely to that 15 minute mark, but rather as a rough temporal indicator of what topics were trending up/down in that general time frame. For precise timelines, you should take a topic from this file and run a search on it using the main Television Explorer interface, select a timeframe of 72 hours and use the resulting timeline to precisely date the topic's coverage (since the Explorer timeline is based on the broadcast timestamp of the show, even if it is processed hours later).

We're excited to see what you're able to do with this new data feed!