How to check if YouTube channel is streaming live

I can't find any informations to check if a YouTube channel is actually streaming or not. With Twitch you just need the channel name, and with the API you can check if there is a live or not.

I don't want to use OAuth, normally a public API key is enough. Like checking the videos of a channel I want to know if the channel is streaming.

You can do this by using search.list and specifying the channel ID, setting the type to video, and setting eventType to live.

For example, when I searched for:

https://www.googleapis.com/youtube/v3/search?part=snippet&channelId=UCXswCcAMb5bvEUIDEzXFGYg&type=video&eventType=live&key=[API_KEY]

I got the following:


{
 "kind": "youtube#searchListResponse",
 "etag": "\"sGDdEsjSJ_SnACpEvVQ6MtTzkrI/gE5P_aKHWIIc6YSpRcOE57lf9oE\"",
 "pageInfo": {
  "totalResults": 1,
  "resultsPerPage": 5
 },
 "items": [
  {
   "kind": "youtube#searchResult",
   "etag": "\"sGDdEsjSJ_SnACpEvVQ6MtTzkrI/H-6Tm7-JewZC0-CW4ALwOiq9wjs\"",
   "id": {
    "kind": "youtube#video",
    "videoId": "W4HL6h-ZSws"
   },
   "snippet": {
    "publishedAt": "2015-09-08T11:46:23.000Z",
    "channelId": "UCXswCcAMb5bvEUIDEzXFGYg",
    "title": "Borussia Dortmund vs St. Pauli 1-0 Live Stream",
    "description": "Borussia Dortmund vs St. Pauli Live Stream Friendly Match.",
    "thumbnails": {
     "default": {
      "url": "https://i.ytimg.com/vi/W4HL6h-ZSws/default.jpg"
     },
     "medium": {
      "url": "https://i.ytimg.com/vi/W4HL6h-ZSws/mqdefault.jpg"
     },
     "high": {
      "url": "https://i.ytimg.com/vi/W4HL6h-ZSws/hqdefault.jpg"
     }
    },
    "channelTitle": "",
    "liveBroadcastContent": "live"
   }
  }
 ]
}

The search-method (https://www.googleapis.com/youtube/v3/search) is awfully expensive to use though. It costs 100 quota units (https://developers.google.com/youtube/v3/determine_quota_cost) out of the 10,000 you have by default. This means you only get 100 requests per day which is terrible.

You could request an increase in the quota but that seems like brute forcing the the problem.

Is there really no other simpler method?

I know this is old, but I figured it out myself with PHP.

$API_KEY = 'your api3 key';
$ChannelID = 'the users channel id';

$channelInfo = 'https://www.googleapis.com/youtube/v3/search?part=snippet&channelId='.$ChannelID.'&type=video&eventType=live&key='.$API_KEY;

$extractInfo = file_get_contents($channelInfo);
$extractInfo = str_replace('},]',"}]",$extractInfo);
$showInfo = json_decode($extractInfo, true);

if($showInfo['pageInfo']['totalResults'] === 0){
    
    echo 'Users channel is Offline';
    
} else {

    echo 'Users channel is LIVE!';

}

Guys I found better way to do this. Yes, it requires you to make GET requests to a YouTube page and parse HTML, but it will work with newer versions + works with consent + works with captcha (most likely, 90%)

All you need to do is make a request to https://youtube.com/channel/[CHANNELID]/live and check the href attribute of the <link rel="canonical" /> tag.

For example,

<link rel="canonical" href="https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC4cueEAH9Oq94E1ynBiVJhw">

means there is no livestream, while

<link rel="canonical" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SR9w_ofpqkU">

means there is a stream, and you can even fetch its data by videoid.

Since canonical URL is very important for SEO and redirect does not work in GET or HEAD requests anymore, I recommend using my method.

Also here is the simple script I use:

import { parse } from 'node-html-parser'
import fetch from 'node-fetch'

const channelID = process.argv[2] // process.argv is array of arguments passed in console

const response = await fetch(`https://youtube.com/channel/${channelID}/live`)
const text = await response.text()
const html = parse(text)
const canonicalURLTag = html.querySelector('link[rel=canonical]')
const canonicalURL = canonicalURLTag.getAttribute('href')
const isStreaming = canonicalURL.includes('/watch?v=')

console.log(isStreaming)

Then run npm init -y && npm i node-html-parser node-fetch to create project in working directory and install dependencies

Then run node isStreaming.js UC4cueEAH9Oq94E1ynBiVJhw and it will print true/false (400-600 ms per one execution)

It does require you to depend on node-html-parser and node-fetch, but you can make requests with the built-in HTTP library (which sucks) and rewrite this to use regex. (Do not parse HTML with regex.)

I was also struggling with API limits. The most reliable and cheapest way I've found was simply a HEAD request to https://www.youtube.com/channel/CHANNEL_ID/live. If the channel is live then it will auto load the stream. If not then it will load the channels videos feed. You can simply check the Content-Length header size to determine which. If live the size is almost 2x when NOT live.

And depending on your region you might need to accept the cookies consent page. Just send your request with cookies={ "CONSENT": "YES+cb.20210420-15-p1.en-GB+FX+634" }.

How to check if YouTube channel is streaming live

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