youtube/channel/lives — the channel's live streams

The call

Parameters (1)

That list is the whole list, and anything else is ignored in silence. An undeclared parameter is not rejected — it produces no error, no warning and no filtering. Check a parameter against this table before assuming a narrower result came back.

What the parameter list does not tell you

LIVES ARE THE THIRD SHELF, after uploads and Shorts, and like the other two they do not appear in each other's routes. A real call on 4 October 2026 returned exactly 1 item. ONE IS NOT A FAILURE: most channels have never streamed, and many that have did it once. Expect a short list or an empty one, and do not treat either as an error — this is the route of the twelve where the most likely honest answer is `items: []`.

⚠️ `metrics` IS `{}` HERE TOO, on that item, for the same upstream reason as `youtube/channel/shorts`: the listing does not carry counters. And on a live stream the counter you would want does not even have one meaning — concurrent viewers during the broadcast and total views afterwards are different numbers, and a listing that reported one of them without saying which would be worse than reporting none. Ask `youtube/video` with the id for the exact figures the API does publish.

`channel_id`, not a handle — same as the other three channel routes. Resolve an `@handle` once with `youtube/channel` and reuse the `UC…` id across all four.

Measured caveats (1)

Why there is no success body on this page

The 200 body for this endpoint is not transcribed here. Reading it needs a client key, and there is no client key on the machine these pages were built from — internal keys exist only as hashes, by design. An example we never received would look exactly like one we did, so instead of composing one, the response shape is documented field by field on the schema pages below. Those are generated from the contract and tested against it in both directions; an invented example would be tested by nothing.

Response shapes (4)

• PostItem — The normalised post shape. `metrics` carries likes, replies, reposts and quotes — and nothing else, because nothing else exists on every platform we read.
• PostsEnvelope — Every posts endpoint answers with this envelope. Eight fields, all required: you can read `success` and `credits_used` without checking whether they came.
• Author — The normalised profile shape, identical across all platforms. All twelve fields are nullable, and that is the design: a field we cannot read comes back null, never 0, because a zero would be a claim about the account.
• ApiError — Every 4xx and 5xx from the API carries this object. The `error` value is a stable string you can branch on; the extra fields appear only for the errors that have something to report.

Error codes (8)

Every one of them carries the same body shape: ApiError. The error value is a stable string you can branch on — branch on that, never on the message text.

400 · 401 · 402 · 404 · 405 · 451 · 503 · 502

Machine-readable

This endpoint is in /openapi.json (OpenAPI 3.1), with its cost on the operation itself. If you are generating a client, use the spec rather than this page — and note that the spec is filtered by what is switched on right now, so it is the better answer to "can I call this today".