The Television Explorer has historically limited search results to a most recent date of 48 hours ago, accounting for the Internet Archive's Television News Archive's 24-hour rolling delay and the fact that it can take up to 48 hours between a broadcast airing and the Archive completing its processing of that show. Given the fast-paced nature of breaking news, this creates complications for journalists and researchers trying to understand how a major news story is being covered across television news, especially if the journalist's or researcher's question is tolerant of incomplete results.
Such access to realtime in-progress results has become ever more critical in the era of fast-moving Covid-19 news.
To assist in this kind of analysis, instead of limiting its results to just fully completed days, the TV Explorer will now display results from all completed broadcasts from the last 48 hours. Note that broadcasts can complete processing and be indexed in random order, so results for the most recent 48 hours should always be considered incomplete and should be labeled with a caveat that "results from the most recent 48 hours are incomplete" or similar.
We're hopeful this new feature helps enable faster more realtime journalism and research!