What we saw last week was live streaming’s Gulf War, a moment that will catapult the technology into the center of the news — and will begin to inexorably alter much of television news as we know it. And that’s not a bad thing. Though it will shake up the economics of TV, live streaming is opening up a much more compelling way to watch the news.

Consider the video posted by Diamond Reynolds, who began streaming on Facebook Live right from the car in which her boyfriend, Philando Castile, had just been shot by a police officer. Or the horrific scene as the gunman in Dallas began his rampage, captured and instantly broadcast on Facebook by a photographer named Michael Kevin Bautista. Or the clip by DeRay Mckesson, one of the leaders of the Black Lives Matter movement, who captured his own arrest in Baton Rouge, La., this weekend on Periscope, Twitter’s live app.

These scenes suggest that streaming apps don’t just have the potential to bring us stories more quickly than TV can. They also greatly expand on the kind of stories you normally see. Streaming news stretches our collective point of view, showing us perspectives from people who might otherwise have been ignored by the news, and from places where television cameras would never have happened to be.

“I think we saw last week that Facebook Live could become the most intelligent cable news network ever built,” said Jonathan Klein, a former president of CNN, who now runs a digital media company called Tapp. With more than 1.65 billion users, he said, “Facebook effectively has one and a half billion news bureaus to capture news, and they’re capable of doing things that a cable news network could only dream of doing.”

Yes, Mr. Klein is speculating about Facebook’s potential path. At this point, neither Facebook nor Twitter is anything close to a TV news network. Facebook Live was started just a few months ago in partnership with several news organizations (including The New York Times, which receives payments from Facebook for producing Live videos). Until last week, it was best known for gonzo journalism involving weird tricks with food. Twitter’s live service, Periscope, is older, but it too is better thought of as a series of one-off clips than a comprehensive source of news.