Roku / news_and_weather / WJTV+ CBS 12 MISSISSIPPI NEWS
REVIEW
WJTV+ is a competent Jackson news feed living inside Nexstar's template.
The CBS affiliate for Mississippi's capital ships a Roku channel that does the basics — live newscasts, on-demand clips, weather — and almost nothing beyond what Nexstar's group framework provides every sister station.
BY THE APP COMRADE DESK · MAY 11, 2026 · 3 MIN READ
WJTV+ CBS 12 Mississippi News
NEXSTAR BROADCASTING, INC.
OUR SCORE
6.8
ROKU
★ 5.0
PRICE
Free
Local-affiliate Roku channels are a strange category. They exist because the broadcast group that owns the station — in WJTV’s case, Nexstar Media, which runs roughly 200 stations across the country — decided every property should have an over-the-top presence. The channels are built from a shared template, customized with each market’s logos and anchor reels, and shipped en masse to the Roku store. Most are functional. Few have a reason to exist beyond a checkbox on a corporate roadmap.
WJTV+ is in that broad middle. It is the Nexstar template with Jackson, Mississippi specifics dropped in: the CBS 12 logo on the splash, the First Alert Weather radar wired to local NOAA feeds, the Daybreak and This Morning anchors smiling from the show tiles. There is nothing wrong with it. There is also nothing about it that a viewer in Columbus or Norfolk wouldn’t recognize from their own market’s Nexstar channel.
What pushes it above 6.0 is that the basics work, reliably, and the one thing a Jackson household actually opens it for — the weather radar during a severe-storm watch — is exactly one click from the home row.
WJTV+ is the Nexstar template with a Mississippi coat of paint — which is more than most local CBS affiliates manage on Roku.
FEATURES
Live 24/7 simulcast of WJTV's CBS 12 news block, on-demand replays of the 5pm, 6pm, and 10pm newscasts, a weather radar tile that pulls from the station's First Alert Weather feed, and a clip library organized by show (Daybreak, This Morning, MS Marketplace) rather than by topic. The channel installs free, no sign-in required, no cable provider authentication.
Navigation is the standard Nexstar layout: a left-rail menu of Live / News / Weather / Shows / About, with tile grids in the main pane. Voice search via the Roku remote works for show titles but not for anchor names or story keywords. Closed captions follow whatever the upstream broadcast feed carries.
No video-on-demand for nationally syndicated CBS prime-time content — for The Late Show or NCIS you still need Paramount+ or a live TV bundle. WJTV+ is local news plus station-produced lifestyle segments, full stop.
MISSION ACCOMPLISHED
The live feed starts in under three seconds on a current Streaming Stick 4K and holds 720p without rebuffering on a residential cable connection. That sounds trivial; it isn't. A lot of local affiliate channels on Roku stall, drop to 480p, or throw a generic error in the middle of a weather alert. WJTV+ does not, in the sessions we tested across late April and early May.
The weather radar deserves singling out. Mississippi sits in the Dixie Alley tornado corridor, and WJTV's First Alert team is the local outlet most Jackson households actually rely on during severe weather. Having a one-click radar tile on the Roku home row is the use case this channel was built for, and it works.
ROOM TO IMPROVE
The Nexstar template is showing. WJTV+ looks identical to WCMH+ in Columbus, WAVY+ in Norfolk, and the other ~120 Nexstar affiliate channels — same tile sizes, same fonts, same left rail, same About page that just swaps the station call letters and address. There is no Jackson-specific identity beyond the logo and the anchor faces. For a station that has covered the city since 1953, that is a missed opportunity.
On-demand clips also drop off the grid after roughly two weeks, with no archive search. If you want to revisit a story from last month, you can't — the station's full archive lives on wjtv.com, not in the Roku channel. A simple "search by date" filter would close most of that gap.
CONCLUSION
Install WJTV+ if you live in central Mississippi and want a fast, free way to pull up CBS 12's evening news or the First Alert radar without grabbing your phone. Skip it if you're looking for CBS network programming — that's a different subscription. The channel does its narrow job well; it just doesn't try to do anything more.