LANDON MELLO

OSINT Challenge #032

9/4/2025

It is always a good day when Sofia posts another OSINT challenge to gralhix.com! This one did not give you much to work with, just a 32 second video of a news broadcast being played on a public TV of some kind. We are asked to find both the exact date and time when the video was recorded, and identify the airport and terminal where the TV screen was located.

The Challenge

The challenge presented two specific tasks:

a) Determine the exact date and time when the video was recorded.

b) Identify the airport and the terminal where the TV screen was located.

Step One: Identifying the Date

The first thing that jumped out to me was the Hindi language, this immediately pointed to India as a country of interest. Using Google Translate I was able to get the station name fairly quickly, "TV9 Bharatvarsh" is a relatively new broadcasting company, but has quickly spread to be one of the most popular in India. One nice thing is they have an extremely active YouTube channel, posting seemingly all of their content to it!

After using Google Translate to see the content, the main story was on an F-16 crash in Ukraine. Unfortunately, TV9 Bharatvarsh has a 24/7 stream on the Russo-Ukrainian War, which means they mention the F-16 a LOT.

My next approach was translating one of the "breaking news" events in the scrolling ticker at the bottom of the screen. One that seemed promising was Sharad Pawar saying "We will not sit silent for the next 2 months." Looking this up was able to give me a general date, then combining that with a Google search to filter the results for that target timeframe was able to get me a small list of videos to sift through!

Eventually I came across something that matched my target fairly well this YouTube video. It is not an exact 1 to 1 match, however I am fairly certain TV9 Bharatvarsh does different streams for local and internet broadcasts, which would explain the difference. Given the date and footage used I am fairly confident in being able to confirm the date as September 1st 2024, 9:14PM.

Step Two: The Location Challenge

Part B was a little bit harder and I was lost on where to start. The video includes very little to start with in terms of geolocation. The only real info I had was the language spoken and the country knowing that the broadcast was in Hindi helped me limit my search to central and north-western India. I started my search by looking for the most popular international airports in the region and ended up checking out the New Delhi airport first.

Using Google search image results, I was able to very quickly find that the glass in Terminal 3 matched with the video exactly, but I was really struggling to find a match for the actual TV units.

I eventually moved away from Google Images and started using street view to view 360-degree images from inside Terminal 3. I still was not having much luck until I found a photo from 2023 which had the exact TV stands I was looking for! I am fairly sure sometime in 2020-2021 all of the old "Samsung" TV stands were replaced with the modern looking black/grey ones! Because most of the photos were uploaded pre-2020, this made confirming the airport extremely hard!