Get Notified When a TikTok Creator Goes Live

A live is the one event you cannot catch late

A video waits for you. A live session does not. If you hear about it twenty minutes in, you have missed the announcement, the drop, the Q&A, the part everyone will be quoting afterwards. And unlike an upload, there is nothing left on the profile to find later, so a late notification is not a slightly worse notification, it is the wrong one. That asymmetry is why "check the profile every so often" quietly fails for lives while looking fine for posts.

It is also why the official route does not exist. Every surface on TikTok's developer platform is scoped to a creator who has connected their own account to your app, which is the opposite of watching someone you do not control. There is no scope, and no combination of scopes, that turns a consent-based display API into a live-start subscription for an arbitrary public creator. Independent monitoring is the only route to the event, and it is what 1322 provides as its seventh source.

Start and end are two events, not one ping

Most tools that advertise live notifications fire once and forget. That is fine for a ping and useless for anything with state: the channel fills with "LIVE NOW" cards that were true an hour ago, and nobody trusts them by the end of the week. The 1322 TikTok feed emitstiktok.live.started andtiktok.live.ended as separate events carrying the same room_id, so a bot can hold the message id from the start, match the end to the same session, and edit the card it already posted. One session, one alert, correct the whole time.

{
  "schema": "1322.tiktok.event.v1", "type": "tiktok.live.started", "platform": "tiktok", "event_id": "01J9Z8QX4T7C2V1M0K3R5B6N7P", "account": { "username": "examplecreator", "display_name": "Example Creator" }, "object": { "room_id": "7300000000000000000" }, "delivery": { "mode": "live_only" }
}

Two fields do quiet work here. event_id is unique per event, so a reconnect never double-fires an alert if you keep a small seen-set. Anddelivery.mode sayslive_only out loud: this is a stream, not a backlog, which is the honest trade for a feed whose whole job is telling you about things while they are still happening.

What you get

How it works

1. Add the creators you care about to your tracked list by @username, over REST, from the dashboard, or with the Discord bot. The tracked list is the entire configuration.
2. Pick a delivery route. The Discord bot is included on every plan and needs no consumer at all; add WebSocket delivery when your own code wants the raw JSON frame.
3. A creator opens a session and tiktok.live.started lands, typically sub-second later, as a formatted Discord card or a JSON event on your socket.
4. They stop, tiktok.live.ended arrives on the same room_id, and your bot closes the alert it opened.

Want the working code? Build a TikTok creator alert bot in Python is a runnable Discord and Telegram bot that does exactly the open-and-close pattern above, and the TikTok creator monitoring API guide covers the full event contract and the two-credential model. If you are still choosing an approach, the trade-offs against official surfaces, DIY scraping and per-call services are laid out in TikTok API alternatives compared.

Who watches lives

Community and bot builders want a Discord channel that fills itself, with a card that is still accurate the next morning. Brand and agency teams watch the creators they pay and the ones their competitors work with, partly to catch a drop and partly to confirm a session actually ran. Trading desks watch the finance and crypto creators who move retail attention, where a live announcement can precede the post that repeats it. Newsrooms watch the creators who break things on TikTok before the story reaches anywhere else, which is covered in the newsroom monitoring guide. Every one of those is a watchlist problem, and a watchlist problem needs push.

The full workflow, end to end, is documented as a reference deployment in the TikTok creator desk case study: what to put on the tracked list, which delivery route matches which team, and what the feed deliberately does not do.

FAQ