Announced via a GDELT Project blog post, the expansion has 34 channels out of the 98 being actively updated daily. News analysts and scholars can use the Visual Explorer to study prominent news readers, as The New York Times did in its series on Tucker Carlson, or learn about the domestic narratives of the Russian invasion of Ukraine from the selection of Belarusian, Russian and Ukrainian domestic television news, which includes playable video clips.
For computational scholars, the Visual Explorer works by representing each broadcast as a thumbnail grid, one frame every 4 seconds through the broadcast. The full-resolution versions of those thumbnail frames are available as a downloadable ZIP file to permit at-scale non-consumptive visual analysis of television news. Here is an example of using a logo detector API to scan a Russian news broadcast for the Fox News logo to find all of the Fox clips being shown on Russian TV. Researchers can also perform a reverse Google Images for each of those frames to find other appearances of that imagery across the open web, allowing cross-domain research tying the broadcast and online worlds together.