The History of BMN Bollentekst

BMN Bollentekst started a year ago. Back then it was still called RTM Teletekst.

Ever since I was little, I've always had an interest in electronics, especially TV and radio. Since 2024 I had been experimenting with making my own TV channel. This usually consisted of a Raspberry Pi with a script that played a bunch of videos. While searching for ways to make my own TV channel, I found a particular person on YouTube who immediately caught my interest. That person is none other than Nathan Dane!

Nathan immediately caught my interest because he did things differently from other people. His goal wasn't to have a TV channel that just played videos 24/7. His goal was to have a TV channel with a real schedule, filler content, and the ability to add live feeds. Unfortunately, Nathan hadn't put those scripts online yet at the time.

After a while I also started watching Nathan's other videos. In those videos he discussed a different topic: teletext. More specifically, Nathan's recreation of Ceefax. After watching Nathan's videos a lot, I started experimenting with WXTed and VBIT2. This was fun, but there were two downsides:

  1. If you use VBIT2 with a Raspberry Pi, you lose part of the picture.
  2. Everything was done manually, which meant I had to retype all the news pages myself.

This obviously took a lot of time, so I gave it up pretty quickly. I first went looking for a way to solve the first problem. After a while of searching I found the TNV1000 online, made by Nathan. After some hesitation I finally decided to send Nathan an email. Miraculously, I got a reply.

Once I was in contact with Nathan, he eventually asked which teletext service I wanted on my TNV1000. I said: "For now Ceefax is fine, but could you explain how I could make an automated service? Given that I'm a 13-year-old with a lot of spare time." A few days later I got a reply. Nathan had made a demo script! After I asked if he could add the option to use templates, he said he had put my service on the TNV1000. I was very happy then.

After a few weeks of waiting, the TNV1000 arrived. I connected it right away. It worked immediately! After that I found the teletext Discord group. I joined and saw that Nathan was in there too. I added him as a friend, hoping I'd get replies faster and because it's easier to communicate that way.

After I started chatting with Nathan on Discord, he explained how to add extra pages, but those were only RSS feeds I could add. That was good enough for the time. After a while I also wanted to add a football results page. Nathan said I should make a scraper for that. I asked Nathan how to do this, since I had never coded in my life. Nathan sent an explanation so I could get started. After a while of trying, I had a working scraper! But now I still had to figure out how to turn the data into a page. After some explanation from Nathan, I managed it!

With the new knowledge I had gained, I started making more pages. Eventually I uploaded all the code to GitHub, under the project name "Dutch-Teletext". By now we're about two to three months further, and I had decided to reform RTM into BMN. This changed the name from RTM Teletekst to BMN Bollentekst. For the new name I had made new templates. They were simple, but looked better than RTM's.

Let's move forward a few more months to November, since not much happened in that time. In November I got to know someone: Soyuzrocket (Adam). I helped Adam set up his own service: HBN Teksti-TV. Because I was very busy helping Adam in November and December, not much happened with BMN. Until January, when something special happened. Adam started making new templates for Bollentekst!

Adam went for an 80s RAI style. He made all the templates, and after that I could start writing the new code. A few weeks later the code was done, and Bollentekst's appearance hasn't changed since. In January I also started another long-term project: BIMS. BIMS would become the new software that generated both HBN and BMN. The goal was to have fewer outages, and since BIMS itself wouldn't fetch the data but EDGE would, BIMS would require little to no changes.

From January through September there wasn't much to see in terms of changes, but behind the scenes Adam and I worked hard on building BIMS and EDGE. Meanwhile Adam was working on new templates for HBN. On September 15th, the day finally came. The old code was shut down and BIMS and EDGE went live. Since BIMS was in use from September 15th onward, HBN was also in the middle of its rebrand. HBN is already quite far along. The most important pages are already there, but some still need to be made.

In September I also got in touch with Dan Farrimond. Dan Farrimond is one of the best teletext artists. I asked him if he'd be willing to make a drawing for BMN Bollentekst's first anniversary. He was happy to do so. You can find his drawing on page 702; it's the drawing with the cake. (The other two are by Adam).

Now we arrive at the present: everything works the way I want it to. I have a wonderful service with lots of content that runs completely automated.

This was the end of my story about BMN Bollentekst. I'm very happy with BMN Bollentekst, and of course I'm very proud of it.

Many thanks to the following people: