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REVIEW
WNCT9+ puts Eastern North Carolina's CBS newscast on the smart TV.
Nexstar's free streaming companion to WNCT-TV Greenville lands on Samsung Tizen with the 9 On Your Side livestream, on-demand clips, and a weather feed tuned to coastal Carolina.
BY THE APP COMRADE DESK · MAY 10, 2026 · 3 MIN READ
WNCT9+ is the Samsung TV version of a very specific bargain that local broadcasting has been making since the FAST-channel boom. Nexstar owns the CBS affiliate in Greenville, North Carolina, and Nexstar has decided that every one of its two hundred-odd stations gets a free streaming app on every major smart-TV platform. The Tizen build of WNCT’s app is the latest piece of that strategy to land on Samsung sets.
The pitch is narrow on purpose. WNCT9+ doesn’t try to be a national news product, doesn’t bundle in syndicated content, doesn’t compete with Paramount+ for CBS network programming. It does one thing — pipe the 9 On Your Side newscast, weather, and high-school sports coverage to a TV in Eastern North Carolina — and it does that thing without a login wall, without a subscription tier, and without any pretence that it’s for viewers outside the DMA.
What makes the WNCT build stand out from the Nexstar fleet is the coastal-weather posture. Hurricane Florence in 2018 and Hurricane Helene’s outer bands in 2024 are the events ENC viewers measure local news against, and WNCT’s app surfaces the radar feed and the meteorologist’s live cut-ins during active weather in a way that treats the streaming product as a continuity-of-service tool rather than a marketing exercise. That’s the right framing for a regional CBS affiliate on a smart TV in 2026.
WNCT9+ is a hurricane-season utility first and a streaming app second — and that framing explains everything about how it's built.
FEATURES
WNCT9+ is the Samsung Tizen build of Nexstar Media's free streaming app for WNCT-TV, the CBS affiliate serving Greenville, New Bern, and Washington, North Carolina — the ENC market that stretches from the Inner Banks down to the Crystal Coast. The app sits inside the same 2026 Nexstar rollout that has dropped roughly two hundred local-affiliate channels onto Roku, Fire TV, Apple TV, and now Tizen.
The lineup is what you'd expect from a station branded "9 On Your Side." A 24/7 livestream of WNCT's newscast, on-demand replays of the morning and evening editions, clip reels organised by category — local news, weather, sports, lifestyle — and a dedicated radar view that surfaces during active weather events. No login is required. No subscription tier exists. The whole thing is supported by short pre-roll and mid-roll ads that mirror the broadcast spots.
Tizen-specific behaviour matches the rest of the Nexstar fleet. Bixby voice search resolves "WNCT" or "Channel 9 Greenville" to the app, the directional-pad layout keeps the livestream one click from the home tile, and the Smart Hub recently-watched row remembers where you left off in a replayed newscast.
MISSION ACCOMPLISHED
The build is sharper than most regional-news streamers because WNCT has a genuinely useful coastal-weather workflow. Hurricane season runs June through November on the North Carolina coast, and the app puts the radar feed and the meteorologist segments on the home rail when a system is active. That promotion logic isn't unique to WNCT — every Nexstar + app does it — but it lands harder here than in markets where the weather story is mostly thunderstorms.
The on-demand archive is fresh in a way that matters. Replays of the 6 PM and 11 PM newscasts post within the hour, individual segments are clipped out and titled within a few hours of broadcast, and the Friday-night high-school football coverage shows up Saturday morning in a dedicated tile. For viewers who cut cable but still want the local product, that cadence is the entire reason to install the app.
ROOM TO IMPROVE
WNCT9+ is what it is — a single-market news utility with no draw outside Eastern North Carolina. The catalogue, weather feed, and sports segments are calibrated for the Greenville-New Bern DMA, which means installing this on a Samsung TV in Charlotte or Raleigh is mostly pointless. Nexstar's fleet is built for in-market viewers and the math doesn't change here.
Ad density is the routine grievance. Pre-roll on the livestream, mid-roll inside replays, and a static banner along the bottom of the player during weather segments. Free-with-ads is the entire business model so there's no escape valve, but the placement during severe-weather coverage sits awkwardly when the content is supposed to be public-safety information. A reduced-ad mode during active National Weather Service warnings would cost Nexstar little and buy the app real goodwill.
CONCLUSION
Install WNCT9+ if you live anywhere from Beaufort to Rocky Mount and you've cut cable — the app gets you the 9 On Your Side product on the living-room TV without a login or a fee, and the hurricane-season radar feed alone justifies the home-screen slot. Skip it everywhere else. The next thing to watch for is whether Nexstar adds a "follow my station" cross-app feature so an ENC viewer travelling to Charlotte can keep the WNCT feed pinned without reinstalling.