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REVIEW
CBS 42+ brings Birmingham's nightly newscast to the smart TV without much ceremony.
Nexstar's local-affiliate streaming app lands on Tizen with live WIAT, on-demand clips, and a weather feed. It's a thin slice of regional TV done competently — and almost no one outside central Alabama needs it.
BY THE APP COMRADE DESK · MAY 10, 2026 · 4 MIN READ
CBS 42+ is the Tizen front door to WIAT, the Nexstar-owned CBS affiliate serving Birmingham, Anniston, and Tuscaloosa. It’s part of a wider Nexstar push to plant a flag on every connected-TV platform with a per-market app — local newscasts, weather cut-ins, and replays of the morning and evening shows, all free and ad-supported. The Samsung TV build follows the same template as the Roku and Fire TV siblings, with the remote-friendly grid and a silent-launch live tile that smart-TV news apps have converged on.
For viewers inside the Birmingham DMA, that’s a clean win. The over-the-air signal already reaches them, but a streaming app means the 5 p.m. and 10 p.m. newscasts can play in a back room without an antenna, and the on-demand rail keeps weather segments around when a system is moving through central Alabama. For anyone outside that DMA, it’s a curiosity. There is no national CBS programming here — that’s the network’s own apps — and no national news desk. This is one local station’s video library, and it knows it.
The honest read: this is utility software for a specific zip code, judged against a specific genre. As that, it’s competent. As anything else, it isn’t trying.
It's a single-market news utility on the living-room TV — and it doesn't pretend to be anything more than that.
FEATURES
Live linear stream of WIAT's local newscasts plus a Storm Team weather channel, with on-demand rails for recent newscast replays, traffic updates, and locally-produced segments. Sign-in is optional through the Nexstar account system, which carries across the company's other affiliate apps. Ads run pre-roll and at standard mid-breaks; the inventory is local-market and national interleaved, in line with the rest of the Nexstar app family. The TV-remote UI is the usual horizontal-rail grid — no search, no profile, no continue-watching. Closed captions are toggleable on the live stream.
MISSION ACCOMPLISHED
The app does the one job a local-affiliate streamer has to do: it boots fast, finds the live newscast on the front tile, and plays it without a sign-in wall. That's a low bar that a lot of station apps still trip over. The Storm Team channel is the right call for this market — Alabama gets enough severe weather that a permanent weather feed earns its slot — and putting it one click from the home rail respects how viewers actually use the app during a watch or warning.
The Nexstar account, optional rather than required, is also right. Local news shouldn't gate its core feed behind a login, and CBS 42+ doesn't.
ROOM TO IMPROVE
The on-demand catalog is shallow and the metadata is rough — segments often share generic thumbnails and headlines that read like internal CMS slugs. There's no way to bookmark or follow a beat (politics, weather, high-school sports) the way the bigger network apps let you, so the back catalog is functionally browse-only. Search is missing entirely on the TV build.
Ad load on the live stream lands heavy at the top of the hour, with stacked pre-rolls that can't be skipped — common across the Nexstar fleet but worth flagging. And the Tizen build, like its Roku sibling, has no second-screen handoff: you can't push a story from the phone app to the TV, which is the obvious feature for a couch-news app in 2026.
CONCLUSION
If you live in central Alabama and want WIAT's newscasts on the smart TV without an antenna, install it — it does that job cleanly and for free. Everyone else can leave it on the shelf; this isn't a national news destination and doesn't pretend to be. The interesting question is whether Nexstar will bolt search, follows, and second-screen handoff onto the whole affiliate fleet at once. That's the upgrade that would make these apps genre leaders rather than genre table stakes.