Twitter (TWTR) finally had good news to share on an earnings day—and much of it was thanks to the success of live video on its platform.

In its Q1 2017 earnings report on Wednesday, Twitter surprised Wall Street with earnings of 11 cents per share (non-GAAP) and revenue of $548 million, both better than analysts expected. Twitter is still not profitable, and its revenue declined, but for the time being, its user growth is more important—an obvious trend these days across much of Silicon Valley, where companies both private and public get a long leash to focus on acquiring users and worry about profit later.

When it comes to user growth, Twitter notched a big win after many quarters of disappointing growth: it added 9 million new users in the quarter, the most it has added since Q1 2015. It also said that daily active users (DAUs) are up 14%, though it does not disclose a total number for daily active users. It has had four straight quarters of DAU growth. Twitter CFO Anthony Noto also said Twitter is seeing “resurrected users that come back” to the service.

Users (both new and old) are coming around to Twitter thanks in part to its live video, the company says. Twitter streamed 800 hours of live video in the first quarter. And in an interview with BuzzFeed the day before earnings, Noto revealed an ambitious plan: Twitter will stream live video 24/7.

That may sound excessive, but it actually makes a lot of sense.

“Our goal is to be a dependable place so that when you want to see what’s happening, you think of going to Twitter,” Noto told BuzzFeed. Indeed, that’s what Twitter has always said it wants to be, and for many in the media, that’s what it is: an indispensable, instant news tool. But the service has struggled to convey that value to a broader user base. (Compare Twitter’s paltry 328 million users to Instagram’s 700 million and Facebook’s 1.8 billion.)

When Twitter went public in 2013, it included a graphic that used four terms: public; real-time; conversational; and distributed. (Facebook, by comparison, kept things vague, calling itself “an open platform,” while Snap called itself a “camera company.”) Early on in its 10-K SEC filing, Twitter defined itself as a place for people to “discover what is happening in their world right now.”

Streaming everything, all the time, would be the ultimate realization of that goal. It’s not a departure; it was inevitable.

That doesn’t mean it’s not risky.

To show live content, Twitter has to spend. Last year, it spent $10 million to live-stream 10 Thursday Night Football games. The NFL streaming was a modest success: Twitter averaged 3.5 million unique viewers per game. But for this season, it lost those rights to Amazon, which will pay five times more: $50 million for 10 games. That price tag may have been too much for Twitter.