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REVIEW
WTEN+ brings Albany's ABC affiliate to the big screen with workmanlike polish.
Nexstar's free streaming app for News10 ABC pipes Albany-area newscasts, weather, and replays onto Samsung TVs. Useful for cord-cutters in the Capital Region, anonymous for everyone else.
BY THE APP COMRADE DESK · MAY 11, 2026 · 3 MIN READ
WTEN+ is the kind of app a local newsroom builds when it accepts that the antenna isn’t coming back. News10 ABC has anchored Albany-area TV news since 1953, first as WCDA, later as the dominant ABC affiliate for the Capital Region. Nexstar’s 2017 acquisition wrapped the station into the country’s largest local-broadcasting group, and with that scale came a shared streaming-app framework — the same one that ships WIVB+ in Buffalo, WROC+ in Rochester, KRON+ in San Francisco. WTEN+ is News10’s instance of it.
On a Samsung TV the app does one thing well and a handful of things adequately. The 24/7 livestream lands on screen quickly and holds together, the on-demand grid refreshes faster than most station apps manage, and Capital Region weather coverage — the reason a lot of Albany households pulled the antenna in the first place — is present and current. The interface is the generic Nexstar shell, which is to say competent rather than considered.
The honest framing is hyper-local. WTEN+ is not a national news app and never tries to be. For a cord-cutter in Albany, Schenectady, Troy, or anywhere the WTEN antenna used to reach, it earns a spot on the Samsung home row. For everyone else, there’s nothing here.
WTEN+ is the kind of app a local newsroom builds when it accepts that the antenna isn't coming back. It works.
FEATURES
WTEN+ is the Samsung Tizen client for WTEN News10 ABC, the Nexstar-owned ABC affiliate covering Albany, Schenectady, Troy, and the broader Capital Region of upstate New York. The app is built on Nexstar's shared local-news streaming framework, the same stack that powers sister stations across the country.
The home view leads with a 24/7 livestream of News10's rolling local-news feed — newscasts when they air, repeats and weather updates in between. Below the livestream sits a grid of on-demand clips: the most recent morning, midday, evening, and late newscasts in full, plus chopped segments by topic (weather, traffic, sports, investigations, the station's "Wake Up With 10" morning block).
Weather gets its own destination with a Capital Region radar loop, hourly and seven-day forecasts, and a tile for active alerts from the National Weather Service Albany office. A separate news-section grid mirrors the wten.com beats: local, New York state, national from ABC News and NewsNation, sports, and the station's investigative team coverage. The app is free with pre-roll and mid-roll ads. No account, no paywall, no Premium tier.
MISSION ACCOMPLISHED
The livestream is the point and the livestream works. Boot the app on a 2024+ Samsung QLED and a current Capital Region newscast is on screen inside five seconds, in HD, with a stable bitrate that holds through the half-hour. For a cord-cutter who used to catch the six o'clock news on channel 10 over the air, that's the entire job.
The on-demand grid is fresher than most local-station apps. Full newscasts post within an hour of air, segment clips inside the hour, and weather updates from chief meteorologist Steve Caporizzo's team refresh through the day. Nexstar's framework handles the heavy lifting; what WTEN brings to it is a newsroom that actually files.
ROOM TO IMPROVE
The Tizen build lags the iOS and Android versions on feel. Navigation is straight directional-pad through a generic grid with no continue-watching row, no personalisation, and no way to favourite the topics or shows you actually follow. Pause-and-resume on the livestream is unreliable: the app frequently restarts the stream from the live edge after a five-minute pause, losing your place in whatever segment you stepped away from.
Ad load is heavy on the on-demand clips — a 30-second pre-roll and a mid-roll inside a four-minute weather segment is common — and the same two or three regional ads cycle for the entire session. There's no skip button, no countdown, and no fallback when an ad fails to load (the player stalls on a black screen until you back out). And outside the Capital Region the app has no purpose: it geo-permits the livestream but the content is hyper-local Albany news, so a Samsung TV in Buffalo or Boston gets a curiosity, not a utility.
CONCLUSION
Install WTEN+ if you live in or care about the Albany–Schenectady–Troy DMA and want News10's newscasts on a Samsung TV without an antenna or a cable box. It does that one job. Skip it everywhere else — the national ABC News content here is better served by the ABC News app proper, and the local-news angle doesn't translate beyond the Capital Region. Watch for whether Nexstar invests in a continue-watching row and reliable livestream resume; both are table stakes the framework should have addressed a year ago.