BVN

BVN (Het beste van Nederland, "The best of the Netherlands"), is a Dutch free-to-air television channel providing Dutch public television to viewers around the world. It is a service of the public broadcasting company of the Netherlands, Nederlandse Publieke Omroep (NPO).

==History== The channel started without prior announcement on 1 June 1996 as Zomer-TV (Summer-TV), an operation aimed at making Dutch-language programming available to Dutch and Flemish holidaymakers abroad. The channel broadcast by satellite across Europe from 8pm to midnight. The output was sourced from the three terrestrial channels of the NPO, and had as its original productions a weather forecast for Europe, a TV version of the ANWB emergency calls and Studio.NL, which was produced by RNW. Wereldomroep announced its plan earlier in the year after the lack of interest from the omroeps in sustaining a potential BVN service to be delivered over satellite. In its founding speech, the TV service provided by RNW would soon become the only analog satellite service in Dutch, as the ensemble of commercial channels (RTL4, RTL5, SBS6, Veronica) announced its plans to start broadcasting using digital encryption. By not booking a full-time transponder, Zomer-TV timeshared with a horse racing channel and CNE, both British niche channels. It was scheduled that the pilot service would shut down on 1 September that year.