The Best Free Roku News and Weather Channels

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Weather Underground is a quickie weather screen I use quite often to check the high and low temperatures for coming days, plus it shows a radar snapshot of your region that can give you warning about major weather movements.

Weather Graphics I use for quickie animated weather radar of my area, mostly in stormy weather.

Weather Nation is another weather news/forecast channel.

What's On? Is a guide to TV show and movie schedules for your local area, which you can set for antenna channels or cable, etc. Great for cord cutters!

The Real News is a surprisingly deep and wide news source, which seems like the PBS News Hour developed into a bigger and more formidable news source. I like how it seems to hold politicians', governments', and corporations' feet to the fire on important issues of the day.

CNN offers up a wealth of recent CNN video clips (courtesy of Nowhereman, I believe).

WBIR and Local 8 Now are the Roku channels for local broadcast TV channels covering my own area and providing news and weather. I list them here to remind Roku users that most of you can likely add your own local TV news and weather stations to your box as well (if you can find them in the channel store, or among the private channels). Having video on demand access to your local news and weather channels on your Roku can be very handy!

Roku Newscaster offers up a rudiumentary sampling of online news, meant more to sate the withdrawal pains of recent cord cutters than anything else, it seems, with its news and magazine show videos from several well known US and international sources, such as CNN, BBC, PBS, CBS, and more.

NBC News may well offer almost every scrap of news video NBC produces on a daily basis (but only includes a few snippets of content from MSNBC, I believe).

Livestream. This one is harder to categorize than most, since it's a place to watch events like Presidential speeches, debates, and announcements live on your Roku. Certain sports and music events might also be caught here, as well as live or recent local news broadcasts for some.

CBS News offers up pretty much all the video clips they've produced of late. Some of these clips are so short you may miss them playing if you blink several times (such as 22 seconds long). But don't think that CBS will let you watch that 22 seconds without first watching a commercial though!

Their news magazine shows like 60 Minutes appear to be on here too, but CBS has divided up each episode into many, many chunks only maybe 2 minutes long each, in order to have the opportunity to ram as many attached commercials down your throat as possible, I believe. Sheesh!

That was my initial impression, anyway. But I tested my theory and found that CBS doesn't always force a commercial on you for every segment-- yet. But they automatically play the next video too, unless you stop them, which means they'd get plenty of chances to slip in more commercials as desired. However, if you love CBS News, or just want badly to see reporting on a particular subject, maybe it'll be worth it to you (there's plenty here).

Huffpost Live offers up a live Huffington Post video feed, as well as plenty of video on demand of its news and opinion items.

Financial Times is a good sized collection of recent clips and videos from a notable world business news source. Unfortunately it gives no clue to the length of its videos. So you might find yourself sitting through commercials longer than the news video you get afterwards.

Bloomberg TV+ is one of those channels which initially open as a single stream, but you can change it to video on demand to browse by pressing the Back button on your Roku remote. Bloomberg basically shows you many of its most recent news video clips here.

ABC News is like Bloomberg in being filled with news videos, and opening as a single stream which can be switched to video on demand with your remote's Back button. But unlike Bloomberg, ABC never displays the length of its videos before you click them.

Blinkx is news fastfood: lots of mostly very brief clips containing sometimes little more than the headline itself about what's happening in the world. But if you're in a hurry, it might give you some idea of what's happening, and fast.

Headlines by Blinkx may be a still more condensed form of the service, for people living at lightspeed, I suppose.

AOL HD is sort of a 'fluff' news and entertainment source, so far as I can tell, trying to compile the sort of highlights from the media firehose which might capture the attention of all ages from 13 to 80. We mostly have this channel for visiting relatives.

FOXNews.com. Yeah: THAT Fox News. We mostly have this for the elderly among us. Yes, I know it's probably not healthy for them psychologically to watch that stuff, but they really like the hate and fear mongering of the show, plus the heated arguments and outright lies (I believe the parent company of Fox News actually won a court case some years back about their lies, where it was declared the first amendment in the USA allows them to lie about most anything they want, with very few limitations).

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