Roku / news_and_weather / KREX+ CBS 5 WESTERN SLOPE NEWS
REVIEW
KREX+ does the local-news job, and not much else.
Nexstar's CBS 5 channel for Grand Junction puts Western Slope newscasts and weather on the TV for free. The shell is a stock template, the ads are heavy, and that is roughly the deal you sign up for.
BY THE APP COMRADE DESK · MAY 10, 2026 · 3 MIN READ
KREX+ CBS 5 Western Slope News
NEXSTAR BROADCASTING, INC.
OUR SCORE
6.2
ROKU
★ 5.0
PRICE
Free
Local-news apps on streaming sticks are a specific kind of utility. They exist because broadcast TV is a hard sell to anyone under sixty in a market where the terrain blocks over-the-air signal, and the station still needs a way to put its 5 o’clock newscast in front of the audience that pays the bills. KREX+ is that utility for the Colorado Western Slope, run by Nexstar’s CBS 5 / FOX 4 operation in Grand Junction.
The honest assessment of a channel like this is that it succeeds or fails on a single question: does it deliver the broadcast feed, on demand and live, without making a viewer in their seventies fight the remote? KREX+ clears that bar. It does not clear many other ones — the Nexstar player template is showing its age, the ad load on VOD is aggressive, and there is no reason at all to install it if you live outside Mesa, Montrose, Delta, or Garfield county.
Inside the coverage area, it earns its tile on the home screen. Outside it, it is invisible by design.
It is a local newscast in a stock Nexstar wrapper. Useful inside the coverage area, pointless outside it.
FEATURES
KREX+ carries the live CBS 5 / FOX 4 broadcast feed from Grand Junction along with on-demand replays of the morning, midday, and evening newscasts, weather briefings, sports highlights, and recurring segments like The Show After the Show and Week in Review. Coverage is scoped to Mesa, Montrose, Delta, and Garfield counties — Grand Junction, Fruita, Palisade, Clifton, Montrose, Delta, Rifle, Glenwood Springs, Parachute, Paonia, Hotchkiss, Meeker, Rangely.
The channel is free to install and runs without sign-in. It is built on Nexstar's standard local-station template, the same one shipping under different call signs for dozens of Nexstar markets across the country. The VOD library is keyed to the directional pad, with a vertical category list down the left and tile rows on the right.
Severe-weather coverage runs as a dedicated row when the National Weather Service has an active alert for the coverage area, and the channel will surface a special-report banner on the home tile during breaking news.
MISSION ACCOMPLISHED
For a viewer inside the coverage area, this is the right answer. KREX-TV has been the CBS affiliate on the Western Slope since the 1950s, and putting the broadcast on a Roku stick beats setting up an antenna in a region where terrain makes over-the-air reception a coin flip. The free price and no-account install are exactly correct for the audience — older viewers in Grand Junction who want the 5 o'clock news on the same TV they already use for Netflix.
The VOD archive is genuinely useful. Missing the morning weather block and being able to catch the eight-minute version on demand at lunchtime is the kind of thing local stations did not offer five years ago.
ROOM TO IMPROVE
The Nexstar template is dated. Tiles render slowly on lower-end Roku hardware, the search field is non-existent (you scroll category rows or you don't find it), and the preroll ad load on VOD clips is heavy — often two ads on a clip shorter than the ad break. The live stream itself buffers more than the major streaming services on the same Roku stick, which on a news channel matters less than on a movie but still grates during a weather alert.
Outside the four-county coverage zone the channel has no purpose. There is no national news fallback, no syndication, no reason to install it if you do not live on the Western Slope. It also duplicates a lot of what is already on the free Roku Channel's local CBS feed for Grand Junction, with a different ad partner and a worse player.
CONCLUSION
Install it if you live in Grand Junction or somewhere along the I-70 corridor between Rifle and Parachute. Skip it everywhere else. KREX+ is not trying to be more than the CBS affiliate's TV-app extension, and judged on that bar it works. Watch for whether Nexstar refreshes the player template across the network — when that happens, this channel will inherit the upgrade.