Samsung TV / information / WBOY+
REVIEW
WBOY+ on Samsung Tizen is a competent local-news lifeline for North Central West Virginia.
Nexstar's ABC affiliate for the Clarksburg–Fairmont–Morgantown DMA brings live newscasts, weather radar, and on-demand clips to Samsung TVs. The Tizen build is a port of the Roku original — same content, slightly slower navigation.
BY THE APP COMRADE DESK · MAY 11, 2026 · 3 MIN READ
WBOY+ is a small app with a specific job: keep the WBOY-TV local newscast on the living-room television for the roughly 320,000 households across north-central West Virginia that have already cut the cable cord. Nexstar Media Group, which owns the station and another 200-plus US local affiliates, has built a near-identical app for every one of them — same player, same backend, different logo and call letters. The Tizen build is the Samsung TV version of that template.
The audience is regional by design. WBOY’s signal covers Clarksburg, Fairmont, Morgantown, and the smaller towns in between, and the app’s clip library reflects that — Mountaineers football, county-commission meetings, severe-weather coverage when the Allegheny front does what it does. For anyone outside that DMA, the app has effectively nothing. For anyone inside it, the live stream and on-demand newscasts are the reason to install.
The Tizen port is functional but second-class. The Roku sibling at storeId 812805 — the original target for Nexstar’s local-news template — runs faster, searches better, and gets new features first. The Samsung version exists because Samsung TVs exist in the WBOY footprint and someone has to serve them. It does that job. It doesn’t do much else.
WBOY+ on Tizen exists for one reason: keeping the local newscast on the living-room TV after the cord got cut.
FEATURES
WBOY+ is the Samsung TV companion to WBOY-TV, the Nexstar-owned ABC affiliate broadcasting on channel 12 from Clarksburg, West Virginia. The app delivers the station's local news output to any 2018-or-newer Samsung smart TV, free, no login.
Core surfaces: a live stream of WBOY's 24/7 news channel, on-demand video for the morning, midday, 5pm, 6pm, and 11pm newscasts, weather radar with the StormTracker 12 branded overlay, and topic-filtered clip libraries (Local, Sports, Politics, High School Football, Mountain State). Sports coverage leans hard on West Virginia University football and basketball, which is the right call for the audience.
The Tizen build mirrors the Roku sibling at storeId 812805 — same content backend, same Nexstar player framework, ported to Samsung's Smart Hub via the standard Tizen TV SDK. No Bixby voice search integration, no Samsung household profile awareness, no casting handoff from a phone. Navigation is directional-pad only.
MISSION ACCOMPLISHED
Local news on the living-room TV without a cable subscription is the entire job, and WBOY+ does it. The live stream is reliable, the VOD newscasts post within an hour of broadcast, and the weather radar loads fast enough to be useful when a severe-weather alert pushes someone to the couch. For households in Harrison, Marion, Monongalia, and Preston counties, this app is the difference between still having a local newscast and not.
The free, no-login model is the right one for a local broadcaster. Anyone in the WBOY signal area — or visiting, or stuck on a Samsung set in a hotel — can launch the app and get the newscast without giving up an email address.
ROOM TO IMPROVE
The Tizen port is visibly a port. Navigation lag between thumbnails runs 200–400ms longer than on the Roku build, and the back-button behavior occasionally drops the viewer two levels up instead of one. Search is keyword-only with no voice input, which on a Samsung remote means hunting an on-screen keyboard with a directional pad. Bixby integration would solve the problem and Nexstar has not built it.
The clip library is shallow outside the last seven days. Anything older than a week becomes hard to find, and there's no proper archive view. Closed captioning works on the live stream but is inconsistent on VOD clips. Picture-in-picture is unavailable — leaving the app pauses the stream.
CONCLUSION
Install WBOY+ if you live in the Clarksburg–Fairmont–Morgantown DMA and want the 6pm newscast on your Samsung TV without paying for cable. Skip it if you don't — the catalogue is hyper-local by design and has nothing to offer outside the signal footprint. Roku users in the same DMA should prefer the Roku build; it's the same content with a snappier interface. For Samsung households, this is the only WBOY option on the TV, and it gets the basics right.