LG / entertainment / NOVAPLAYER
REVIEW
NovaPlayer on LG is the same empty m3u pipe, with a different name on the listing.
Masa IT Services publishes the LG webOS build of NovaPlayer — a generic IPTV player that ships without channels and waits for the playlist you bring.
BY THE APP COMRADE DESK · MAY 11, 2026 · 3 MIN READ
NovaPlayer landed on LG’s Content Store under publisher “Masa IT Services” and was last updated in mid-April 2026 — the same product as the Tizen NovaPlayer in shape and spirit, with a different developer name on the listing and the webOS conventions wrapped around it. The job is the same: parse an m3u link, draw an EPG, play the streams. The differentiation question is the same. So is the answer, mostly.
What makes the LG build slightly more pleasant than its Tizen sibling is the Magic Remote. Tile-dense channel grids reward a pointer in a way they punish a directional pad, and NovaPlayer’s grid is exactly that shape. Channel-switch latency on a recent LG OLED is fine. ThinQ voice search against channel names works when the playlist’s metadata is clean. None of this is unique to NovaPlayer — every webOS m3u player gets the same hardware lift — but the lift is real.
What stops the LG build from being a recommendation in its own right is the same thing that stopped the Tizen one: a brand-new listing from an unknown developer in a category where trust is the only product. A five-star rating with no visible review count is not vetting. The webOS Content Store has fewer of these apps than Tizen does, which makes the incumbents easier to find — and harder to dislodge. NovaPlayer on LG is a free fresh parse for users who already know what they are doing. For anyone else, it is a pipe waiting for content that this app has no intention of providing.
The product is a URL field, an EPG grid, and the assumption you already have a playlist link in your password manager.
FEATURES
NovaPlayer on LG's Content Store is a third-party IPTV client published by Masa IT Services and last updated mid-April 2026. The webOS build is free, ships with no preloaded content, and asks the user to paste in an m3u or m3u8 playlist URL (or Xtream Codes credentials) on first launch. From there it behaves like every other player in this category — a channel grid, category filters, an electronic programme guide rendered from whatever EPG XML the playlist exposes, favourites, and a last-watched row.
Playback covers HLS, MPEG-TS, and progressive MP4 over HTTP and HTTPS. Subtitles render when the source provides them. The webOS-native pieces work the way you would expect from a 2025-era media app: Magic Remote pointer navigation on the channel grid, ThinQ voice search against channel names, and standard webOS suspend / resume behaviour.
Outside the playlist-loading workflow there is no VOD library, no series tracking, no DRM, no built-in catch-up. Everything beyond live-channel playback depends on what the provider's feed exposes. Multi-list support lets users keep a couple of sources side by side without re-pasting credentials.
MISSION ACCOMPLISHED
The Magic Remote integration is the LG-specific lift. NovaPlayer's channel grid is dense, and pointing at a tile is faster than ratcheting a directional pad across rows of forty channels — particularly on a freshly loaded list before the favourites pile up. Channel switch latency on a 2024 LG OLED is comparable to the better Tizen-side players in the same category.
Listing honesty helps too. The store page does not claim a content library, does not advertise channels the app cannot deliver, and does not hide the bring-your-own-playlist requirement under feature bullets. Free with no trial wall lowers the cost of finding out whether your existing m3u source plays cleanly on webOS.
ROOM TO IMPROVE
LG's Content Store has fewer m3u-player entrants than Tizen, but the ones that are there — established players with multi-year update histories — already have the trust signal that a six-week-old listing from an unfamiliar developer cannot match. A five-star rating on LG with no visible review count is not a vetting signal, it is a default state. Nothing in the listing tells a first-time user why to pick this app over the incumbent webOS choices.
No transcoding, no cloud playlist sync, no parental PIN, no recording, no developer website linked from the Content Store page. The name returns mostly the unrelated Android music player on a web search, so users cannot easily verify who is behind the app or what its track record looks like on other platforms.
CONCLUSION
NovaPlayer on LG is the right install for an LG TV owner who already pays an IPTV provider, whose current player has misbehaved, and who wants a free fresh-parse test against the same playlist URL. It is the wrong install for anyone shopping the Entertainment category without a playlist link in hand — the app does nothing on its own. The webOS-specific test the app has not yet faced is the next eighteen months of LG firmware updates; players in this category survive on patch cadence, and Masa IT Services has not yet shown one.