liveStreamingDetails for playlistItems YouTube Data API v3 - youtube-api

Question

I am looking for a way to detect if a video is a live stream. The YouTube Data API has a property liveStreamingDetails when using its Videos.list endpoint.
However this is not present when using the PlaylistItems.list endpoint.
Obviously I am not going to make another call (after PlaylistItems.list) just to get this property. Is there a way to find out what video from PlaylistItems.list is a live stream?

Answer 1

Unfortunately, the answer to your question is negative:
As per the official specification, the response returned by the PlaylistItems.list API endpoint is a JSON object of which items property is an array of PlaylistItems Resource objects:
{
"kind": "youtube#playlistItem",
"etag": etag,
"id": string,
"snippet": {
"publishedAt": datetime,
"channelId": string,
"title": string,
"description": string,
"thumbnails": {
(key): {
"url": string,
"width": unsigned integer,
"height": unsigned integer
}
},
"channelTitle": string,
"videoOwnerChannelTitle": string,
"videoOwnerChannelId": string,
"playlistId": string,
"position": unsigned integer,
"resourceId": {
"kind": string,
"videoId": string,
}
},
"contentDetails": {
"videoId": string,
"startAt": string,
"endAt": string,
"note": string,
"videoPublishedAt": datetime
},
"status": {
"privacyStatus": string
}
}
This object contain only a limited amount of metadata info attached to the video items the PlaylistItems.list endpoint provides back.
Consequently, you have to acknowledge that, if needing the liveStreamingDetails property attached to videos returned by PlaylistItems.list, you have to request this info from the Videos.list API endpoint separately: query this latter endpoint by passing to its request parameter id a comma-separated list made of the IDs of the videos of your interest (but no more than 50 of them).
Do note that each Videos.list endpoint call is very cheap: it has attached a quota cost of only one unit, irrespective of the number of video IDs passed on to it.