Leo Laporte typically begins an episode of TWiT by stating the show's number, title, sponsors and playing the theme tune, then introducing the week's panelists and guests.
The main portion of the show consists of a round-table discussion and debate, pegged loosely to a selection of the week's major technology headlines.
The most frequently recurring guests on TWiT included John C. Dvorak, Patrick Norton, Wil Harris, Kevin Rose, Robert Heron, David Prager, Tom Merritt, Roger Chang, and Jason Calacanis.
Futurist Amy Webb and journalists Iain Thomson, Alex Wilhelm, and Dwight Silverman are among the frequent panelists in more recent years.
Other guests include Becky Worley, Steve Gibson, Xeni Jardin, Alex Lindsay, Owen Stone, Veronica Belmont and Molly Wood.
The show has had a number of famous guests, including Steve Wozniak, Kevin Mitnick, John Hodgman, Lawrence Lessig, artist Roger McGuinn, as well as Star Trek: The Next Generation cast members LeVar Burton (Geordi La Forge) and Wil Wheaton (Wesley Crusher).
[10] After publishing the show on his blog to an enthusiastic public reception, Laporte decided to rename this discussion "episode 0"[10][11] and turned the round-table concept into a weekly downloadable audio file, or "podcast," featuring more cast members from his former TechTV program The Screen Savers.
The first episode was posted on Monday, April 18, 2005, as Revenge of the Screen Savers, but it was temporarily renamed "Return of the [BEEP]"[12] and shortly thereafter changed in response to a cease and desist letter sent to Laporte from Comcast, owners of TechTV's intellectual property rights, arguing it too closely resembled the defunct show's name.
In response, Leo Laporte stated that he was a believer that his content should be made available to the widest audience possible in the format of their choice, as well as philosophically agreeing with the open source nature of Ogg Vorbis.
A sponsorship deal with America Online was announced on July 4, 2005, following the server demand that resulted from the release of iTunes 4.9's built-in podcasting directory.
In several episodes, Laporte has noted that the distributed nature of BitTorrent makes it impossible to accurately gauge the popularity of the show, decreasing the likelihood of attracting advertisers.
However, due to ongoing costs as a result of TWiT.tv's constant expansion, a roadmap for the introduction of podcast and web-based advertising was announced during episode 45 of This WEEK in TECH.
Listener funding has been used for the operational costs of the network including improvements to Laporte's recording studio and to purchase radio-quality microphones and digital audio-recording devices for the hosts.
[18] Before recording started for This Week in Tech 268 on October 3, 2010, while discussing the sale of TechCrunch to AOL, Laporte mentioned that his network would "do three to four [million US$]" in advertising revenue for 2010.