Earlier this month we introduced direct ImageID referencing to the Visual Explorer, allowing you to specify a specific ImageID for a given broadcast and jump directly to a clip playing from that frame. Today we've added the identical capability for time offset referencing to make it easier to access clips from the TV News Archive's website directly in the Visual Explorer. For example, TV News Archive URLs typically have a URL structure that looks like:

• https://archive.org/details/CSPAN_20230530_203000_U.S._House_of_Representatives_U.S._House_of_Represenatatives/start/547/end/582

In this case the 547 in the URL signifies that the clip begins 547 seconds after the start of the broadcast. Historically there was no easy way to jump to a time offset like this in the Visual Explorer, making it difficult to find the identical clip. Now you can simply add the new "&offset=" URL parameter to the Visual Explorer to implement this functionality.

Thus, to see the same clip as above (though with a fixed 60-second length instead of the specified endtime above), you would use this URL:

• https://api.gdeltproject.org/api/v2/tvv/tvv?id=CSPAN_20230530_203000_U.S._House_of_Representatives_U.S._House_of_Represenatatives&offset=547

We hope this makes it easier to access our new Visual Explorer Lenses for Archive-style clip URLs.