YouTube API v3.0: How do you determine if a video is 'pay-per-view'?

Question

I am using the YouTube Python API (v3.0) to query YouTube with specific video IDs, and I would like to know which ones of the videos listed in the results are paid-content (there are some TV-shows in there).

I have gone through the 'video' object parameters (https://developers.google.com/youtube/v3/docs/videos), but I have not been able to find anything useful:

• 'contentDetails.licensedContent' flag does not seem to match non-free videos
• 'status.license' seems to be almost always set to 'youtube'
• 'status.embeddable' also does not seem to depend on free/not-free

Any suggestions or solutions are welcome!

Answer 1

There's no field in the youtube#video object that represents whether a specific video costs money. You could use a rough proxy, like the presence of youtube#video.contentRating, as a clue that the video might be something that's television/film content, but that doesn't necessarily mean that it's paid content.