 In 1955, they were America's leading and largest independent producer, with a reported two thousand employees at one point and Ziv was able to buy his own television production studio, after years of leasing from the Hollywood studios.The following year, in 1956, the Big Three television networks, ABC, CBS and NBC, realized how successful they could be by syndicating their own previous hits, a negative move that cut deeply into the first-run syndication television market.Then Ziv began producing series for the networks, beginning with "The West Point Story" for CBS in the fall of that same year.