Founded in April 1990, by a group of students (the founding CEO was Allan Martinson), it sought to inform foreign correspondents in Moscow of developments in the Baltic States' struggles for independence from the Soviet Union.

BNS is a holding company for separate organizations in Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania.

[1][2] BNS disseminates news in Russian and English (as well as the domestic languages of Estonian, Latvian, and Lithuanian) via the internet and by other means.

Subscribers include media, financial, industrial, and government institutions in the Baltic States.

[9] To satisfy regulatory concerns, Eesti Meedia sold Latvian BNS operations (subsequently renamed Latvian News Service) and media monitoring service Mediju Monitorings to a third-party Estonian company named AMP Investeeringud on 31 August 2015.