Bulgarian national television

Bulgarian National Television

Type	Broadcast television and internet
Country	Bulgaria
Owner	Public broadcaster
Key people	Vyara Ankova (general director)
Launch date	1959
Official website	http://www.bnt.bg/

Bulgarian National Television (Bulgarian: Българска национална телевизия, Bŭlgarska natsionalna televiziya) or BNT (БНТ) is the public broadcaster of Bulgaria. The company was founded in 1959 and began broadcasting on December 26 of the same year. It began broadcasting in color in 1970. BNT's headquarters are located in Sofia, Bulgaria, in a building located at the well-known address of 29 San Stefano Str.

BNT's first live broadcast was the parade on the occasion of the October Revolution anniversary. BNT is funded from government funds (around 60%) with the rest coming from television commercials. It broadcasts two television channels: the over-the-air BNT 1 and the international BNT World, a channel aiming to broadcast Bulgarian production only. Another channel, Efir 2, existed between 1974 and 2000, and was later substituted by the private bTV. The channel was relaunched on October 2011 as BNT 2

BNT operates four regional broadcasting centres, based in Blagoevgrad (Pirin programme), Varna (More programme), Plovdiv (Plovdiv programme) and Rousse (Sever programme). They were merged to create the BNT 2 channel in October 2011.

After Bulgaria started official DVB-T transmissions on March 1, 2013, BNT got its own multiplex, which is available nationally and is operated by First Digital Ltd. The multiplex includes BNT 1 and BNT 2. The first new channel to be included to the multiplex is the new HDTV channel BNT HD.