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REVIEW
WMBB+ brings Panama City's ABC affiliate to the Samsung TV home row.
Nexstar's Tizen companion app for WMBB News 13 streams local Panhandle newscasts, weather, and on-demand segments straight to the living-room set — useful in a hurricane season, thin the rest of the year.
BY THE APP COMRADE DESK · MAY 10, 2026 · 3 MIN READ
WMBB+ is the Samsung Tizen app most Samsung TV owners will never install, and the one a specific slice of the Florida Panhandle should. It’s the streaming companion to WMBB News 13, Panama City’s ABC affiliate, part of the Nexstar Media station group that has spent the last few years putting a ”+” app on every connected-TV platform for every station it owns. The Tizen build is the same templated experience the Roku, Fire TV, and webOS versions ship — a live stream, a rail of recent newscasts, a weather tab, and not much else.
There is, in 2026, a real argument for these apps. Antenna reception in coastal Florida is unreliable in storm season, cable penetration in Bay County is declining, and a free over-the-top live stream of the local ABC newscast — accessible from a Samsung TV’s home row in two button-presses — is the kind of utility that earns a single permanent slot on a household’s connected-TV launcher. WMBB+ earns that slot for a few thousand Panhandle viewers and is invisible to everyone else.
The honest read is that local-station companion apps remain product afterthoughts at the parent-company level. The template works, the streams play, the weather rail surfaces during emergencies, and that’s the bar. WMBB+ clears it. Whether Nexstar ever invests in making these apps feel like more than utilities is the open question for the category.
WMBB+ is a hyper-local utility app that earns its place during hurricane season and not much else.
FEATURES
WMBB+ is the Samsung Tizen streaming companion to WMBB News 13, the Nexstar-owned ABC affiliate serving Panama City and the wider Florida Panhandle. The Tizen build mirrors the Roku, Fire TV, and webOS versions of Nexstar's "+" station apps — a templated player wrapped around one station's content.
The home screen leads with a live stream of the over-the-air broadcast, followed by on-demand reels of the most recent newscasts (Morning, Midday, 5pm, 6pm, 10pm) plus standalone weather updates, sports clips, and longer feature segments. A separate "WMBB Weather" rail surfaces radar loops and severe-weather alerts when the National Weather Service flags the coverage area.
The app is free and ad-supported. Pre-rolls run before live tune-in and on-demand segments; mid-rolls land at the natural commercial breaks in archived newscasts. No subscription tier, no account requirement, no geofencing beyond the standard US-only check. Sign-in for ABC network primetime is not supported here — that lives in the separate ABC app — so WMBB+ is local content only.
MISSION ACCOMPLISHED
The live stream is the value. For Bay County residents in a power outage with a battery-powered Samsung TV — or for snowbirds tracking conditions back home from a second residence — being able to launch the station directly on the living-room set without hunting for the right HDMI input or fumbling with antenna reception is genuinely useful. The stream resolution is broadcast-equivalent and the latency from the OTA feed runs around 30 seconds, which is fine for news.
The on-demand library is organised the way local-news viewers actually use it. Yesterday's 6pm newscast is two clicks from the home tile, weather segments are pulled out as their own rail, and the most recent severe-weather coverage promotes to the top during active events. That's the right product instinct for a market that sees a hurricane warning every few years.
ROOM TO IMPROVE
The Tizen build inherits the same flat, template-driven design as every other Nexstar "+" station app — large tiles, sparse metadata, no search, no favourites, no continue-watching. It works, but it looks like a 2019 channel app and behaves like one. Navigation past the first two rails is slow, and the remote-control focus state occasionally drops between rows.
Ad load on the free tier is heavy by local-news standards. A two-minute weather clip will routinely carry a 30-second pre-roll and a mid-roll, which is a steep ratio when the underlying content is free over the air. There's no way to authenticate via cable or pay-TV provider to lighten the ad density. The lack of an ABC network-content tab also means viewers expecting "Good Morning America" or primetime ABC shows have to bounce to a different app entirely.
CONCLUSION
WMBB+ is a hyper-local utility. Install it if you live in or care about the Florida Panhandle — particularly during the June-to-November hurricane window, when having the station one remote-click away on a Samsung TV is worth the install. Outside the coverage area there's nothing here. Watch for whether Nexstar eventually unifies its station apps under a single national shell; until then, this is a one-market tool that does the one market's job.