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REVIEW
WHNT19+ brings Huntsville's CBS affiliate to the Samsung TV — competently, narrowly.
Nexstar's local-news streaming app for WHNT-TV, Huntsville's longtime CBS affiliate, delivers North Alabama newscasts and weather on demand to Tizen. It does exactly what local TV apps are supposed to do, and nothing more.
BY THE APP COMRADE DESK · MAY 11, 2026 · 3 MIN READ
WHNT19+ is the kind of app that exists for a specific group of viewers in a specific corner of the country, and that’s the right way to evaluate it. WHNT-TV has served the Tennessee Valley since 1963 — CBS affiliate, Channel 19, Huntsville-based, owned by Nexstar since the 2019 Tribune merger. The Tizen app is the cord-cut household’s version of leaving the television tuned to WHNT all evening, and for North Alabama viewers that’s a useful thing for a Samsung TV to be able to do.
The framework underneath is Nexstar’s Local24 shell, the same one running across roughly 200 affiliate stations under different branding — WGN, WPIX, KRON, and the rest of the group. That’s why the navigation patterns will feel familiar to anyone who’s used a Nexstar app on another platform, and it’s also why the rough edges are consistent: occasional cold-start lag, captions that drift on replays, and a “Sports” tile that often points at wire-service clips rather than the local high-school football coverage that’s the actual draw in this market in October.
The honest evaluation is that WHNT19+ does what a local-news app for a Tizen TV should do, and it doesn’t pretend to be anything else. Severe-weather coverage works. The replay catalogue is current. The livestream is the broadcast. For a household in Madison or Decatur or Athens, that’s the entire job, and the app accomplishes it. For anyone outside the DMA, there’s no reason to install this rather than the equivalent app for the local CBS affiliate where you actually live.
WHNT19+ is a utility for North Alabama viewers, not a streaming destination — and it understands which of those two things it is.
FEATURES
WHNT19+ is the Samsung Tizen build of Nexstar Media Group's local-news streaming app for WHNT-TV, the CBS affiliate serving Huntsville, Decatur, and the Tennessee Valley. The app surfaces a 24/7 livestream of WHNT News 19 newscasts, on-demand replays of the morning, midday, evening, and late-night broadcasts, and a separate live channel for breaking news cut-ins during severe-weather coverage.
Content sections: Live (the rolling news channel), Weather (current conditions, radar loop, and the seven-day forecast from the WHNT weather team), News (on-demand clips and full segments), and Watch (the most recent full newscast). Categories include local news, North Alabama sports (Alabama and Auburn coverage, high-school football during the fall), and a dedicated severe-weather feed during active warnings.
Tizen-specific behaviour: launches from the Samsung TV home row, supports Bixby voice search for stories and anchors by name, and runs in the background as a picture-in-picture tile on 2023+ Samsung sets. No subscription, no account, no paywall — the app is ad-supported with the same 90-second pre-roll and 30-second mid-roll cadence as the broadcast.
MISSION ACCOMPLISHED
Severe-weather coverage is the genuine reason this app exists, and it gets that part right. North Alabama sits in the heart of Dixie Alley — the secondary tornado corridor that runs across Tennessee, Mississippi, and Alabama — and WHNT's weather desk is one of the more trusted local resources during active warning events. The app's live cut-in behaviour during a confirmed warning matches what viewers expect from the over-the-air broadcast.
The on-demand replay catalogue is also useful. Missing the 6pm news because dinner ran long no longer means waiting for the 10pm broadcast — the full segment is on the home tile within an hour, with chapter markers for weather, sports, and the lead local story. That's a meaningful quality-of-life improvement over the cable-DVR era for the cord-cut household.
ROOM TO IMPROVE
The Nexstar Local24 app framework that WHNT19+ runs on is a shared shell deployed across roughly 200 Nexstar stations, and the seams show. Navigation lag on first launch is noticeable on lower-end Samsung sets — five to seven seconds before the home tile populates — and the app occasionally drops back to the home screen when the livestream encounters a backend hiccup. Closed-caption rendering on the on-demand clips lags the audio by a few hundred milliseconds, which is a regression from the broadcast feed.
The non-news content is thin. The "Sports" section often surfaces wire-service highlights rather than locally-produced segments, and the "Lifestyle" feed leans on syndicated Hill Country and morning-show clips that don't reflect the Huntsville market. For viewers outside the WHNT coverage area — including anyone in Birmingham, Mobile, or Nashville — the app has no real reason to exist; the relevant local-news app is the one for that DMA.
CONCLUSION
Install WHNT19+ if you live in North Alabama and want WHNT's newscasts and severe-weather coverage on the TV without the cable subscription. The app is competent at its job, and during a tornado warning that competence matters more than polish. Outside the Huntsville-Decatur-Florence DMA, there's no use case — Nexstar has a similar app for whichever station serves your market, and that's the one to install instead.