His parents were Jewish immigrants; his father William, a manufacturer of button holes for overalls, came to the US in 1884 from Kelm, Lithuania (then part of the Russian Empire) and his mother Rose from Bessarabia three years later. By July 1948, the company had bought four such libraries -General, Miles, Kinogram and Forster - providing a total of more than 13 million feet of film. By that same year, 1948, the company had opened a television production subsidiary, Ziv Television Programs, Inc; which produced some of America's best-remembered shows, including television versions of The Cisco Kid (1949), the first American television program filmed in color, and Mr. District Attorney, plus such original creations as Highway Patrol. Maybe the best remembered Ziv television production ever was 1 Led Three Lives, one of the few 1950s television crime dramas addressing the real or alleged Communist menace as an overt subject. Bat Masterson, fictionalizing the legendarily dapper marshal, gunfighter, and eventual sportswriter of his namesake, and Sea Hunt were also Ziv's first-run syndicated television productions. Ziv Television Productions trademarks included odd for the times twists on the genres of his shows, twists such as a crime-fighting underwater explorer (Lloyd Bridges as Sea Hunt's protagonist Mike Nelson) and Highway Patrol, starred Broderic Crawford as Dan Mathews.