Go live monitoring of an upcoming video, i.e. queued live stream going live?

[Jibun no Kage]

New to the Google APIs, specifically, trying to use the YouTube Data API.  I have a small python script that 'watches' for any queued live stream 'going live', i.e. an operator clicks on the 'go live' button on the queued video web page.  But this has an issue, because every time I query for the 'go live' state (i.e. on or off) it consumes 300 of my 10,000 quota.  My script may need to query for several minutes, and at 300 a query, 10,000 quota disappears fast.

What am I missing here?  Why would 1 query to the API, consume 300 quota units?