Ziv Television Programs, Inc. was an American television syndication and production company, producer of popular syndicated TV programs in the 1950s.
The company was founded by Frederick Ziv in 1948 and was a subsidiary of his successful radio syndication business, which had begun in 1937. The company produced pre-recorded programs and sold them directly to local television stations. The television syndication service proved lucrative during the late 1940s and early 1950s, as local television stations wanted to fill their schedules during hours outside of "prime time". By 1955, Ziv was producing more than 250 half-hour TV episodes a year.
As the Big Three television networks began offering programs outside of prime time, Ziv's popularity began to decline. The market for first-run syndicated television programming began to dwindle, and the company began to produce programs which aired over the networks in 1956. In 1960 the company was purchased by United Artists and merged with its own television unit to become Ziv-United Artists, but two years later, the name changed back to United Artists Television after the studio phased out Ziv Television Programs' operations.
Today most of the rights to Ziv's TV shows are distributed by MGM Television, SFM Entertainment and the Peter Rodgers Organization; some of them have fallen into the public domain.
ZIV International, on the other hand, was an unrelated producer and distributor of Americanized anime shows in the 1970s and 1980s.