Roku / news_and_weather / WOWK+ CBS 13 NEWS & WEATHER
REVIEW
WOWK+ is the Tri-State newsroom Roku owners actually use.
Nexstar's CBS affiliate for Huntington and Charleston ports its newscasts and weather radar to Roku with the same template the chain ships everywhere — which is fine, until the storm cell crosses the Big Sandy.
BY THE APP COMRADE DESK · MAY 11, 2026 · 3 MIN READ
WOWK+ CBS 13 News & Weather
NEXSTAR BROADCASTING, INC.
OUR SCORE
6.8
ROKU
★ 5.0
PRICE
Free
The WOWK call letters have been on the air in Huntington since 1955, and the station has been the CBS affiliate for the Charleston–Huntington DMA — the Tri-State, in local shorthand — for almost as long. Nexstar acquired the license in 2017 and the newsroom now files alongside sister stations across the chain. WOWK+ is the Roku expression of that newsroom: a free, ad-supported channel that mirrors the linear broadcast and adds an on-demand library of recent segments.
This is a category where the Roku channel exists because the station is contractually obliged to ship one, not because the station is a software shop. That is true of nearly every local-news app on the platform, and the honest review is to judge each one against what its audience actually does with it. In the Tri-State, that means two things: catching up on the newscast they missed at six, and finding out whether the StormTracker 13 cell crossing the Ohio River is going to drop golf-ball hail on St. Albans.
WOWK+ is a competent box for the first job. It is a fragile one for the second.
WOWK+ is a competent box for last night's newscast and a fragile one when the radar is what you opened it for.
FEATURES
WOWK+ is the Roku channel for WOWK-TV, the CBS affiliate broadcasting from Huntington and Charleston, West Virginia, and serving the Tri-State market that wraps into eastern Kentucky and southern Ohio. The channel carries a 24/7 livestream of WOWK's news content, a video-on-demand archive of recent newscasts (morning, evening, late), and a parallel feed of "StormTracker 13" weather segments and radar loops sourced from the station's meteorology desk.
Navigation follows the Nexstar template every sister affiliate ships: a left-rail menu (Live, Latest, Weather, Sports, About) and a horizontal carousel of thumbnails on each shelf. The remote's directional pad scrolls, OK plays, back exits. There is no account, no login, no profile. The channel is free with pre-roll and mid-roll ad pods of 30 to 90 seconds depending on the segment length.
Weather lives in its own shelf rather than a dedicated radar app — you scrub between recent forecast clips, the latest StormTracker 13 segment, and a static radar image rather than the live looping map the WOWK website serves.
MISSION ACCOMPLISHED
Replaying yesterday's 6 PM newscast on a TV in the kitchen is exactly what this channel was built for, and it does that with no friction. Tile, play, content. The Tri-State stories — county commission meetings in Cabell, mine safety hearings in Boone, flood response from the Guyandotte — are the reason to install it; the wire-service national segments at the top of every newscast are filler everyone has seen already.
Launch time on a current Roku stick is fast enough that you don't notice it. The stream holds at 720p without buffering on a modest connection, which matches the resolution of the source broadcast — there is no fake upscale to 4K being attempted, and the channel is honest about that.
ROOM TO IMPROVE
The weather shelf is the weakness. When a severe-weather watch crosses the Tri-State and the audience actually opens WOWK+ to find out whether the cell is heading for South Charleston or Barboursville, what they get is a recorded segment from earlier in the day and a static radar still. The live radar loop on wowktv.com does not exist on Roku. Local TV-news Roku channels live or die on weather, and this is where Nexstar's template costs the station.
The ad insertion is also heavy-handed in a way the underlying TV broadcast isn't. A six-minute archived segment will carry a 30-second pre-roll, a mid-roll, and a post-roll — the original linear broadcast had one commercial break in the same window. Free is free, but the math is worth knowing before you settle in.
CONCLUSION
Install WOWK+ if you live anywhere from Ashland to Logan to Point Pleasant and you want yesterday's local newscast on the TV that's already there. Skip it as your severe-weather tool — keep the wowktv.com radar bookmarked on a phone for that, or pair this channel with a dedicated weather-radar Roku app. Watch for whether Nexstar ever ships a real live-radar component to the affiliate template; until they do, this is a catch-up app, not a live-event one.