Big Tech This Week, the media company founded by entrepreneur and former Meta executive Fatu Ogwuche, is expanding into live video with a weekly technology show that will stream news rundowns and interviews to African audiences.

The programme, called Tech This Week, will pair a roundup of technology news with conversations spanning business, products and culture. Ogwuche said the show will be free to watch and financed through sponsorships, advertising and paid segments.

The launch builds on an earlier Twitter Spaces series run under the Big Tech This Week banner, which Ogwuche said drew more than 100,000 cumulative listeners over the course of a year. That audio programme featured discussions with founders, investors and other technology professionals — and gives the move into video an existing audience already accustomed to following the brand live.

According to Ogwuche, the new show is beginning with roughly four sponsors whose backing has secured enough funding for a full year of weekly broadcasts. She declined to disclose the size of the investment or name the sponsors in an interview with TechCabal.

Her core argument is that articles and pre-recorded podcasts rarely give audiences sufficient opportunity to engage with the people building companies that increasingly shape daily life. “It’s a very important time to hear directly from the people who are essentially in the middle of your life,” she said.

Ogwuche cited TBPN, the live technology show covering Silicon Valley, as a reference point for the format. Tech This Week aims to bring comparable immediacy to African technology coverage, anchoring conversations to developments across the industry. The target audience spans founders, investors, operators, regulators and everyday users of technology products.

Across Big Tech This Week’s existing formats, Ogwuche said the largest share of its audience falls between the ages of 25 and 44, with viewers and readers in Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, South Africa and Ethiopia — a footprint stretching across West, East and Southern Africa — as well as diaspora markets including Britain, the United States and Canada.

A widening story pool

The show’s debut coincides with what Ogwuche describes as a broadening range of stories emerging from African technology companies. Over the past decade, she argued, much of the industry has concentrated on essential services such as payments, savings, investing and business tools. Those businesses remain central, but she also observes founders turning their attention to gaming, entertainment, sport and other fields.

That shift, in her view, opens the door to covering technology through the people behind it and the cultural changes surrounding it, in addition to company announcements and fundraising milestones.

“The last decade has been building for survival,” she said. Now, she sees more founders building from “joy” and “curiosity”. In her framing, that widening canvas strengthens the case for formats beyond print and pre-recorded audio — the very limitations she says leave audiences underserved.

The programme intends to place established industry figures on the same stage as newer founders, engineers and product managers. Ogwuche said her industry relationships would help her secure guests who do not routinely give interviews — an element she considers central to the pitch. The show’s appeal will depend partly on whether it can consistently bring compelling guests into a regular broadcast and give audiences a reason to follow the conversation live.

Ogwuche also plans to extend coverage beyond Nigeria. Speaking from Addis Ababa, where she had been meeting founders, she said the programme would pursue stories from across the continent. “Even now with the show, it’s also going to make me be more disciplined about ensuring that we’re adequately covering milestones from other parts of the continent,” she said.

That ambition carries an editorial challenge: producing a recognisably African show without letting Nigeria’s founders and companies dominate the agenda. Ogwuche acknowledged that the weekly schedule would demand greater discipline in tracking developments elsewhere. Whether that continental scope holds once the weekly cadence begins is one of the format’s early tests.

Access and scrutiny

A programme built on founder access must also decide how to deploy it. Asked how she would keep the show from becoming a platform for guests to promote themselves without scrutiny, Ogwuche said her approach would include coverage of both business achievements and regulatory trouble.

“If you’re building and you’re doing something incredible, I’m going to cover it,” she said. “If you land in trouble, I’m also going to cover it.”

She described her style as steering clear of “gotcha” journalism while rejecting the notion that access should translate into favourable treatment. At the same time, she was clear that the programme would emphasise innovation and promising developments in the industry. “What I really want to focus on is the positive things that happen,” she said.

Beyond sponsorships and advertising, Ogwuche said some segments will be paid for, with product reviews among the formats under development. She did not detail how commercial segments would be distinguished from independent editorial coverage — a distinction that will matter to viewers as the programme works to build its authority. How — and how visibly — that line is drawn will be worth watching as paid formats such as product reviews come online.

Building a weekly habit

Ogwuche has invested in equipment and commissioned a set for the programme, choosing to build production capacity for a recurring broadcast. Sponsorship has helped finance those preparations and, she, secured the runway to air consistently for 12 months. That funding horizon makes the first year a clearly marked window for the show to establish a recurring live audience.

The live show will also feed a broader distribution operation. Full interviews and clips will be published on YouTube and social media, including Instagram and LinkedIn, while audio will be distributed through Spotify and Apple Podcasts. The arrangement gives the company multiple routes to reach people who miss the live broadcast, and extends the show’s reach beyond the audience watching at a scheduled time.

Internet access remains a constraint. Ogwuche said the programme would primarily serve a digital audience, though she hopes journalists and broadcasters will draw on its interviews to relay relevant information to people through other channels.

Her larger ambition is to demonstrate that African technology coverage has room for more formats — and that audiences will return for them. “We need to keep creating things that are fun, enjoyable, but also authoritative,” she said.

Source: TechCabal