To make a tech news explainer video, answer three questions in order: what happened (one sentence, dated and sourced), how the underlying thing works (the part most coverage skips, and the part that keeps the video useful for months), and what it changes for the viewer. Draw the mechanism rather than showing keynote footage or logos: a diagram of how a chip is made, how a model is trained, where the money flows. Write the script from primary sources, date every number on screen, and publish within days of the news but make the middle section evergreen. The news is the hook; the explanation is what people come back for.

News channels and explainer channels are different businesses

A pure tech news channel competes on speed. It has to post within hours, it competes with every outlet and every reaction channel, and its videos are worth very little a fortnight later. That is a hard game to win faceless and alone.

A tech explainer channel uses the news as a reason to explain something that stays true. "Apple announced a new chip" is news. "Why chip makers keep shrinking transistors, and why it is getting harder" is an explainer that the announcement gives you a reason to make. The first video peaks in two days. The second keeps getting search traffic every time a chip is announced.

The best faceless tech channels do the second thing with a news peg. That changes what you write:

If the news section is more than about a fifth of the video, you have made a news video, and it will age like one.

A worked outline: "Is AI a bubble?"

This is a good example because it is the kind of question that keeps returning with every earnings season, and because it is easy to answer badly. An answer of "yes" or "no" in the first minute is an opinion video. An explainer gives the viewer the tools to judge for themselves.

Notice that no chapter needs a number you cannot source, and the numbers that are in it (revenue figures, spending totals) appear with a date and source on screen. Market figures go out of date fast and are frequently misquoted, so if you cannot find a primary source for a number, leave it out. Chapter 7 is what makes the video evergreen: it gives the viewer a way to answer the question again next year without you.

Also notice the balance in chapters 5 and 6. Tech coverage drifts into cheerleading or doom, and viewers have learned to distrust both. Giving each side its strongest form is cheap and it is what people subscribe for.

Sources: the part that decides whether you are trusted

Tech news is full of confident secondhand claims. A rumour on a forum becomes a "report" on a blog becomes a fact in a video. Rules worth keeping:

• Go to the primary source. The company's own announcement, the earnings filing, the paper, the court document, the regulator's notice. Then cite it in the description with a link.
• Date every number. "As of the second quarter of 2026" on screen. A video without dates looks wrong the moment anything changes.
• Separate announced from shipped. A launch event demo, a roadmap and a product people can buy are three different things. Say which one you mean.
• Mark speculation as speculation. "Analysts expect" is not "it will". Attribute forecasts to whoever made them.
• Check AI-drafted lines hardest. If you draft a script with ChatGPT, every product name, version number and date in it needs checking. Language models are especially unreliable on recent events, which is exactly what tech news is about.

What to show instead of keynote footage

Faceless tech channels often fill the screen with launch event clips, product renders and logos. That has two costs. Keynote footage and promotional video are copyrighted and get claimed, and a logo on screen for twenty seconds explains nothing.

What actually helps the viewer is the mechanism drawn out:

• A process as a pipeline. How a model is trained: data, training run, fine-tuning, deployment, each a box with an arrow.
• A system as a diagram. What happens when you type a URL, or how a phone pays at a terminal.
• A market as a flow. Who pays whom, drawn as arrows with labels.
• A change as a before and after. The old architecture next to the new one, with the difference highlighted.

Here is what that looks like in practice, a whiteboard video tracing a URL from the browser through DNS to the server and back:

That video has no news peg at all, which is the point. A tech news video about a browser change, an outage or a new protocol could use exactly that middle section and stay useful long after the story moved on.

Speed without errors

The news window is real: an explainer posted three weeks after the story gets less of the initial search spike. But the explainer part of your video can be made before the news happens. Keep a bank of evergreen middles for the topics your channel covers (how chips are made, how models are trained, how app store fees work, how encryption works) and when a story breaks, you write a new opening and closing and reuse the explanation you already checked.

For the script itself, how to turn a ChatGPT script into an animated video covers what to strip from a drafted script before it becomes narration. If your channel is more curiosity than news, the companion guide on how to make a 'why does' curiosity channel is the better model.

Make it

1. 1

   Write the one-line news peg

   What happened, when, according to whom. Link the primary source. If you cannot write it in one sentence, you do not understand the story yet.

2. 2

   Pick the mechanism worth explaining

   Ask what a viewer would need to understand for the headline to make sense. That is your middle section, and it is most of the video.

3. 3

   Script it at about 150 words a minute

   Peg, mechanism, consequence, then what to watch. 1,200 to 1,500 words is an 8 to 10 minute video. Date every figure.

4. 4

   Paste it into openCanviz

   Use Keep my wording so dates, names and version numbers come through exactly. Whiteboard suits systems and pipelines; poster style suits a big-picture question.

5. 5

   Check every label on screen

   Drafted visuals can get a label or a number wrong. Edit any scene where the drawing does not match the narration, and fix any figure that is not the one you sourced.

6. 6

   Cut a vertical version

   Make a 9:16 Short from the clearest mechanism scene and point it at the full video.

Common questions

How fast do I need to publish? For a pure news video, within a day. For a news-pegged explainer, within the week is usually fine, because the search interest in "how does X work" lasts much longer than interest in "X announced".

Can I use screenshots of articles or company announcements? A brief screenshot of a headline, used as evidence while you comment on it, is typical commentary. Whole articles and promotional videos are not yours to reuse. A drawn headline card with the source written on it does the same job.

How do I avoid sounding like an advert for the company? Give the strongest criticism of the product or move its own section, and attribute claims ("the company says it is twice as fast") rather than repeating them as fact.

What if the story changes after I publish? Pin a comment with the correction, add it to the description, and if it changes the conclusion, make a follow-up. Dating your figures on screen makes this much less painful.