Samsung TV / videos / LBCI LEBANON
REVIEW
LBCI Lebanon brings Beirut's biggest private network to the Samsung living room.
The Tizen client for Lebanese Broadcasting Corporation International delivers the LBCI live feed, news bulletins, and on-demand archive to Samsung TVs anywhere in the diaspora — free, in Arabic, with no account required.
BY THE APP COMRADE DESK · MAY 11, 2026 · 3 MIN READ
LBCI Lebanon
LEBANESE BROADCASTING CORPORATION INTERNATIONAL
OUR SCORE
6.9
SAMSUNG TV
★ —
PRICE
Free
LBCI is the Lebanese Broadcasting Corporation International, the country’s largest private free-to-air network and, since the 1990s, the dominant force in Lebanese television journalism. The eight o’clock news bulletin is the show most Lebanese households still set a clock by — at home in Beirut, and at the same hour, six or seven time zones ahead, in the diaspora kitchens of Dubai, Sydney, Houston, and São Paulo. A first-party Samsung TV app for that network is overdue.
The Tizen client landed in March 2026 and does the one thing it needs to do. The LBCI live feed plays cleanly on a 2024 Samsung Crystal UHD set in a flat in Limassol; the news block from Beirut arrives without satellite-receiver friction; the archive of recent programmes is browsable from the remote without anyone in the household needing to know what an IPTV box is. For a generation of Lebanese viewers who left Lebanon and brought satellite habits with them, that’s the doorway the app was built to be.
It is not a sophisticated app. The archive is thin on metadata, there are no captions, the ad load on free is heavier than satellite, and discovery beyond the live feed needs work. None of that changes the recommendation for the audience this was built for. LBCI on Tizen is less an app than a doorway — and for a Lebanese household in Dubai or Sydney, the doorway is what matters.
LBCI on Tizen is less an app than a doorway — and for a Lebanese household in Dubai or Sydney, the doorway is what matters.
FEATURES
LBCI Lebanon is the official Samsung TV client for Lebanese Broadcasting Corporation International, the largest private free-to-air broadcaster in Lebanon. The app streams LBCI's main satellite feed live, alongside the station's news bulletins, talk shows, drama serials, and current-affairs programmes on demand.
Core surfaces are minimal: a Live tab carrying the rolling LBCI signal, a Programmes index broken down by show (Naharkom Said, Kalam El Nass, Vanessa Show, LBCI News at 8), a News section with the most recent bulletins available as individual clips, and a Search field. Content is in Arabic; the interface carries Arabic and English labels.
No login, no subscription, no paywall. The station's revenue model on this surface is pre-roll and mid-roll advertising — the same Lebanese advertisers that run on the satellite feed run on the Tizen player. Resolution tops out at 1080p on the live feed; archived programmes are typically 720p depending on age.
Released to the Samsung TV store in March 2026, updated most recently in April 2026. No tablet or phone counterpart on Samsung Galaxy — this is a TV-only build that mirrors the existing LBCI apps on Apple TV, Roku, and the lbci.lb web player.
MISSION ACCOMPLISHED
Diaspora access is the win, and it is a real one. Lebanese households scattered across the Gulf, Europe, North America, Australia, and West Africa have spent two decades watching LBCI through satellite-receiver workarounds, paid IPTV bundles of variable legality, or a phone propped on the coffee table. A first-party Tizen app on a Samsung TV — the dominant smart-TV brand in most of those markets — is the cleanest version of that pipeline yet.
The live feed is the centre of gravity. LBCI News at 8 is the most-watched single broadcast in Lebanese television, and having it appear on a Samsung set in Houston or Dubai at the same hour it airs in Beirut is the use case the app was built for. Stream stability through the first six weeks of the app's life has been reasonable for a launch — occasional buffer dips, no sustained outages reported on the Samsung store side.
ROOM TO IMPROVE
The app is thin. There is no chromecast-style handoff from the LBCI phone app, no profile system, no continue-watching memory across sessions, and no captions or subtitle track on either the live feed or the archive. For Arabic-speaking viewers that last omission is tolerable; for second-generation diaspora children whose Arabic is conversational at best, it is the gap that keeps them off the app.
Discovery inside the archive is rough. The Programmes index lists shows alphabetically without season or air-date grouping, and individual episodes don't carry summaries — viewers who didn't already follow the show on satellite have no way in. Search returns title matches only, no transcripts or guest names.
Ad load on the free tier is heavier than the satellite feed, especially around the news block, and the pre-roll can repeat the same Lebanese bank spot two or three times before the programme starts. There's no paid tier on offer to remove it.
CONCLUSION
Install LBCI Lebanon if there is a Lebanese household behind the Samsung TV — in Beirut, in Tripoli, in any of the diaspora cities where Lebanese satellite was previously the only option. The app is unfinished in the ways most national-broadcaster TV apps are unfinished, but the live feed works and the news block is on time. Watch for an MTV Lebanon Tizen counterpart and for whether LBCI ships captions in the next update; both would change the recommendation.