Accessing Guest Star / Stream Together participants with an app access token?

API
1

Hi,

I’m building an academic analysis of the French-speaking Twitch ecosystem, a longitudinal record of live channels, used to study how the ecosystem is structured. Non-commercial university research.

One of the things I’d like to measure is co-streaming: when several channels broadcast together, that’s an explicit tie between them, and it would be far cleaner than inferring collaborations from stream titles.

From the documentation, the Guest Star endpoints all seem to require a user access token from the broadcaster, with channel:read:guest_star or the moderator equivalent. That works for one channel that has authorised my app, but not for observing a population.

Two questions:

  1. Is there any way to see the participants of an ongoing Stream Together session with an app access token, on channels that haven’t authorised my application? The information is displayed publicly on the channel page, so I want to check I’m not missing an endpoint.
  2. If not, is there a route through which a research project could obtain read access to that metadata?

Thanks for any pointer.

2

No

Even if App Access was supported, you’d still need prior authentication from broadcaster(s)

What first party does and what third party is allowed to access are governed by different rules, legal or otherwise or chosen not to be supported

No

Apologies is this is short but it’s a flat out no.

See also Section B: Twitch Developer Services Agreement

But that won’t grant this access either

Additional note: a lot of the Stream Together API’s are tagged Beta and currently lag behind what the product can do as the product has moved but the API’s have not.

3

Thank you, that’s the clarity I needed. A definitive no now is worth more than a maybe, since it stops me building on something that isn’t there.

Your point about first-party display versus third-party access is well taken.

Two follow-ups if you don’t mind.

1. For a whole-population census I currently poll /helix/streams (language=fr, paginated) every 15 minutes, recording which channels are live and their public metadata. Is polling the right pattern at that scale, or would EventSub stream.online and stream.offline be viable with an app access token across a large number of broadcasters? Exact session boundaries would be much more useful to me than a 15-minute grid, though I’d rather not go down that road if subscription limits make it impractical.

2. You mention Section B. Is there a known route or contact for the research agreement provision, or is a ticket on help.twitch.tv the only door? I’m at a French university and the project is academic and non-commercial, so I’d rather ask the right desk than send a ticket into a general queue.

Thanks again for answering so quickly and so clearly.

4

Eventsub has a 10k limit for unauthenticated users. here you won’t be getting authentication

Additionally you don’t know whom to subscribe to in the first place.

So polling.

I believe so yes and/or they can route your ticket to the right place

5

Perfect, that settles it. The point about not knowing whom to subscribe to in the first place is the one I hadn’t thought through properly. It makes polling the only sensible pattern rather than merely an acceptable one, so I’ll stay on /helix/streams.

I’ll open a ticket on help.twitch.tv for the Section B route.

Thanks for taking the time on all of this. Three clear answers in an afternoon have saved me from building at least two things that wouldn’t have worked.

Cheers.