Samsung TV / videos / RADIO BANOVINA
REVIEW
Radio Banovina brings a small Croatian regional broadcaster to the Samsung TV.
A free Tizen client for the Glina-based radio station and its associated RTB video channels — a hyperlocal Banija-region listen that earns its place on a diaspora living-room TV more than a general one.
BY THE APP COMRADE DESK · MAY 10, 2026 · 3 MIN READ
Radio Banovina
RADIO BANOVINA
OUR SCORE
6.0
SAMSUNG TV
★ —
PRICE
Free
Radio Banovina is a Croatian regional broadcaster from Glina, in the Banija (or Banovina) region of central Croatia — a corner of the country with a complicated 20th-century history and a population that, between emigration and the 1990s war, is now scattered across half of Europe and North America. The station’s terrestrial signal reaches a few transmitters around Sisak-Moslavina County. The Samsung TV app, released in April 2026, extends that signal to anyone with a modern Tizen set and a Wi-Fi connection.
The Tizen client itself is unremarkable in the way a small-broadcaster app should be. You launch it, you pick the main stream or one of the sub-channels, and music plays. The station’s mix runs to Croatian pop, folk, retro hits, and the occasional disco block — exactly what you’d expect from a regional FM station that has been broadcasting on 96.8 from Petrova Gora for years. There is no premium tier, no account, no advertising overlay inside the app itself. The video channels under the RTB sub-brand pick up when scheduled programming is live and otherwise sit idle.
The honest framing is this: Radio Banovina on Tizen is not for general Samsung TV owners. It’s for the Banija diaspora, for second-generation Croatian families abroad who want their parents’ station running in the kitchen, and for people still living within the home transmitter footprint who’d rather use the TV than a radio. For that audience, the app is genuinely useful. For everyone else, it’s a curiosity in the Samsung store — a small Croatian station that decided shipping on Tizen was worth the effort, which says something quietly hopeful about how niche broadcasters are now thinking about the living room.
Radio Banovina on Tizen is a regional Croatian station broadcasting through a TV instead of a transistor. Audience matters more than polish.
FEATURES
Radio Banovina is the Tizen client for the Croatian regional broadcaster of the same name, based in Glina in the Banija (Banovina) region of Sisak-Moslavina County. The over-the-air signal reaches central Croatia on 96.8 MHz from the Petrova Gora transmitter, 93.2 MHz from Kravarsko, and 99.1 MHz around Glina. The Samsung TV app is a free streaming front end for that broadcast plus the station's RTB video channels.
The interface is straightforward: pick a stream, hit play, leave it running. The main Radio Banovina audio feed is the default. Secondary streams cover the station's sub-brands and the RTB video channel feed when programming is live. Croatian-language menus only — there's no English localisation.
Released in April 2026, the app is current with the station's mobile-first push and replaces ad-hoc browser playback on older Samsung sets. No login, no account, no subscription. Audio bitrate appears to be a standard MP3 stream — fine for ambient listening, not audiophile material.
MISSION ACCOMPLISHED
This exists, and for a regional Croatian broadcaster shipping a Tizen build at all is the achievement. Most stations of this size would stop at a web player and a phone app. A native TV client means a Banija-born listener in Zagreb, Frankfurt, or Toronto can run the home-region station through the same Samsung TV they already own without dragging out a phone or laptop.
The app launches quickly and the stream connects within a couple of seconds on a modern Samsung set. For an audio app on a TV the bar is low — start, play, don't crash — and Radio Banovina clears it.
ROOM TO IMPROVE
The audience is small by design. If you're not from the Banija region or part of the Croatian diaspora that grew up with this station, there is no reason to install this over Spotify, TuneIn, or any of the larger Croatian broadcasters with TV apps. The category listing as "videos" in the Samsung store is misleading — this is primarily a radio app with secondary video channels, not a video-first product.
No metadata display while a stream plays — no current track name, no DJ, no programme schedule overlay. Croatian-only menus will block any non-speaker who stumbles in. Stream reliability depends on the station's own infrastructure rather than a major CDN, and a small broadcaster's uptime is what it is.
CONCLUSION
Install this if you have a personal connection to Banija or if Radio Banovina was part of your household growing up. The TV client does what it needs to do and nothing more. For everyone else, TuneIn covers the same stream alongside thousands of others, which is the more honest place to find it. The app's existence on Tizen is the genuinely interesting part — a regional Croatian station shipping a smart-TV build is a small sign of how broadcasters under a million listeners have begun to take the living-room screen seriously.