Roku / news_and_weather / WBOY+ 12 NEWS WEATHER & SPORTS
REVIEW
WBOY+ is a competent local-news app for a market that needed one.
Clarksburg's NBC affiliate puts its newscasts, weather radar, and high-school sports on Roku without overreaching. The result is unremarkable in the way local TV apps should be.
BY THE APP COMRADE DESK · MAY 11, 2026 · 3 MIN READ
WBOY+ 12 News Weather & Sports
NEXSTAR BROADCASTING, INC.
OUR SCORE
7.0
ROKU
★ 5.0
PRICE
Free
Local TV apps on Roku are a category most people never think about until a tornado warning rolls through their county at 11pm. Then they think about them very specifically: does my local station’s app launch, does it show the radar, does it tell me whether the cell is moving toward my house. WBOY+, the streaming companion to Clarksburg’s NBC affiliate WBOY-TV, is built for exactly that moment — and it handles it.
This is a Nexstar-built app behind WBOY paint, which means most of the engineering decisions were made in Irving, Texas rather than Harrison County, West Virginia. That’s the trade modern local-station apps make: a small newsroom gets a competent streaming product without having to build one, in exchange for the standardised UI and the standardised ad stack. For a market the size of Clarksburg-Weston, the trade is the right one.
Reviewing it on its own terms means asking whether it does the local job. It mostly does.
WBOY+ does the unglamorous work of putting a local newsroom on the biggest screen in the house, and it doesn't fumble the basics.
FEATURES
WBOY+ streams the station's live broadcast 24/7, including the 5pm, 6pm, and 11pm newscasts from Clarksburg's WBOY-TV. The channel carries an on-demand library of recently aired segments, organised by show (12 News This Morning, 12 News at 5, weather forecasts) and by topic (local, state, weather, sports).
Storm Tracker 12's radar feed gets its own tile, with animated regional radar covering the Mountain Lakes and north-central West Virginia coverage area. The weather section also exposes the station's seven-day forecast and any active National Weather Service alerts for the DMA.
Friday Night Sports — the station's high-school football and basketball franchise — surfaces highlights and full-game replays during the season. The app is free, ad-supported, and built on Nexstar's shared streaming framework, which is why it looks and feels like the company's other affiliate apps (WFLA+ in Tampa, WROC+ in Rochester) under different paint.
MISSION ACCOMPLISHED
The live stream actually launches when you press OK. That sounds like a low bar, and it is, but it's the bar a lot of station apps on Roku still trip over. WBOY+ resumes on the live feed by default, holds 1080p without buffering on a current Streaming Stick 4K, and surfaces a weather alert banner at the top of the home screen when one is active for Harrison County — the single most useful thing a local-news app on a TV can do.
The on-demand archive goes back further than expected — recent segments from the past week stay browseable rather than rolling off after 24 hours. For a Clarksburg viewer who missed the 6pm newscast, the app is now a genuinely better way to catch up than digging through the station's website.
ROOM TO IMPROVE
The ad load between segments is heavy and the same two or three spots repeat across an entire viewing session. This is a Nexstar framework problem rather than a WBOY one, but the experience is the experience: a three-minute weather segment can carry a thirty-second pre-roll and a mid-roll, with no frequency capping. Competing affiliate apps in larger markets get more ad variety; Clarksburg's smaller DMA gets the same handful on rotation.
Closed captions are inconsistent on on-demand segments — present on the live stream, missing or out-of-sync on roughly a quarter of archived clips we sampled. For a local-news app, where the audience skews older and accessibility matters, this is the gap to close first.
CONCLUSION
WBOY+ is the right kind of small-market app: it stays in its lane, ships the live feed reliably, and gives Clarksburg viewers something useful on the living-room screen. Install it if you live in the WBOY coverage footprint or have family who do. Outside north-central West Virginia, there's no reason to seek it out — and that's fine.