[SOLVED] Check if Channel is livestreaming in Youtube via Youtube API

Check if Channel is livestreaming in Youtube via Youtube API

Trying to check if a Youtube channel is currently livestreaming via a HTTP request to the YoutubeAPI. I used the request detailed at this post: How to check if YouTube channel is streaming live

I sent the following curl request: curl -X GET "https://www.googleapis.com/youtube/v3/search?part=snippet&channelId=UCLdl1fJeDXzdid6AmXE2YHg&eventType=live&type=video&key={API_KEY}"

As detailed in the previous stackoverflow post

And it returns this JSON:

{
  "kind": "youtube#searchListResponse",
  "etag": "9l4yMKnNWF8cwlGKh_JJCKYdIEI",
  "regionCode": "US",
  "pageInfo": {
    "totalResults": 0,
    "resultsPerPage": 0
  },
  "items": []
}

I understand that "items" returning an empty set means that the channel is not live, although in checking the channel through youtube, it is live. (Also I have double checked the channelID and it is the correct one). What am I doing wrong here?

Edit: I've tested it more and it only works for certain channels but not others. Is there an explanation for this?

Solution

For some reason, using the channel ID that you obtain from sending the following get request:

curl -X GET "https://www.googleapis.com/youtube/v3/channels?part=id&forUsername={USERNAME}&key={API_KEY}" does not work when trying to find an active live broadcast for the channel.

Instead, I stumbled upon a roundabout way by using the "q=" parameter, which essentially searches for any YouTube video that contains the string in the "q=" parameter, to find the live stream via the name of the video live stream itself.

This is when I found out that the ChannelID that gets returned by this request is different from the ChannelID I got from the request above.

Using this channel ID I was able to get the video ID of a youtube live stream assuming that the channel was live.