Scheduling a Google Hangout (on Air) in advance vi

Question

I wonder if it is possible to schedule Hangouts on Air via any of the Google APIs. There is a similar question asking whether it is possible to start one, but I am more interested in scheduling them, say, a week ago via an API and be able to retrieve the Youtube URL on which it will be broadcasted.

More specifically, what I have in mind is scheduling the Hangout ahead of time and sending an invitation email to its participants. Then, say, 15 minutes before the scheduled starting time of the Hangout, its participants could log in and set up the live stream settings themselves.

The whole idea is to ease the job the participants are required to do by maintaining this scheduling-ahead-of-time and invitation tasks by automating them. The participants of the Hangouts are not expected to have any technical proficiency, so they should be able to jump in a Hangout on Air by simply clicking on a link included in the invitation email they received.

I looked into Hangouts on Air to do this but it appears that API is only useful to develop apps that interact with existing/ongoing Hangouts on Air. Looked into Youtube Live Steaming API as well. It helps live streaming a video stream, but there doesn't seem to be a part of the API that helps scheduling a Hangout on Air.

There is this tricky way to schedule an event with a hangout and send invites to people. But that option is not applicable as it is just a plain hangout and consequently can not be streamed live on YouTube. (i.e. not a Hangout on Air)

Any ideas as to how I can manage this?

Answer 1

Ive been searching for the same functionality for a couple of months now. Even if you schedule a Hangout on Air ahead of time and send invites. You need to be online to initiate the HoA as there are couple of steps before you can start broadcast.

The other problem is if your participant starts the HoA, the video will stream through his youtube account and not yours.

You can use a hangout button to directly start a HoA and writing a hangout app to fetch the live stream url, you can stream the HoA on your website. This wouldnt require you to initiate anything but as I said, the video will be posted through the users account.