Live broadcasts

ytstudio livestreams drives YouTube's liveBroadcasts API: schedule broadcasts, transition them through testing/live/complete, update settings, and surface the bound stream's RTMP ingest URLs. The actual video push to YouTube still happens through your encoder (OBS, Streamlabs, etc.).

Lifecycle

flowchart LR
    A[schedule] --> B[ready]
    B --> C[testing]
    B --> D[live]
    C --> D
    D --> E[complete]

Listing and showing

ytstudio livestreams list --status upcoming      # only what is scheduled
ytstudio livestreams list --status all -n 50     # everything, capped at 50
ytstudio livestreams list -o json                # machine-readable
ytstudio livestreams show <broadcast-id>         # details
ytstudio livestreams show <id> --ingest          # also the bound stream's RTMP URLs
ytstudio livestreams show <id> --show-key        # reveal the stream key

Stream keys are credentials

--ingest is safe to pipe into a script: the stream key is redacted to its last four characters. Only pass --show-key when you need the actual key for your encoder, and treat the printed line as a secret.

Scheduling

schedule is dry-run by default: it prints the body it would send and exits. Pass --execute to actually create the broadcast.

ytstudio livestreams schedule \
    --title "Office hours" \
    --scheduled-start 2026-06-01T19:00:00+02:00 \
    --scheduled-end   2026-06-01T20:00:00+02:00 \
    --privacy unlisted \
    --not-made-for-kids
# review the preview, then:
ytstudio livestreams schedule \
    --title "Office hours" \
    --scheduled-start 2026-06-01T19:00:00+02:00 \
    --privacy unlisted --execute

Quota

liveBroadcasts.insert and liveBroadcasts.update cost roughly 50 quota units each. See API quota for context.

Going live

The start command has a --to flag that picks the target state.

ytstudio livestreams start <id> --to testing     # monitor stream (preview)
ytstudio livestreams start <id>                  # default: --to live
ytstudio livestreams stop <id>                   # transition to complete

Transitions are asynchronous; the CLI prints the current status and a hint that it may take a moment to settle.

Updating

update accepts the same field flags as schedule plus the contentDetails toggles. It is dry-run by default and only sends the parts that actually changed, while preserving contentDetails.monitorStream (YouTube rejects content-detail updates that omit it).

ytstudio livestreams update <id> --privacy unlisted --no-dvr
ytstudio livestreams update <id> --latency low --auto-start --execute

update does not expose the made-for-kids flag, because liveBroadcasts.update only accepts privacyStatus under status. Set the COPPA flag at schedule time.