Some heavy duty action on the programming front is what the Sony group's AXN channel has lined up for its viewers with a slew of new shows set to debut over the next four months.

Covering essentially action series and reality programmes, 12 new programmes will be launched in the new year, AXN managing director Todd Miller said today.

AXN, which is currently in the middle of a major promotion around the Asiawide premiere of the multi-award winning blockbuster movie "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" on 29 December, will be launching three new reality shows in February, Miller revealed. These would be launched almost immediately after the two reality shows currently airing on the channel - "Survivor" and "Amazing Race" - complete their run in January. Elaborating on one of the shows which will be screening on AXN, Miller said "Fear Factor" (it aired on the NBC network) was the biggest show of the summer of 2001 on US television. Miller would not provide details of the other two shows. He added, again without giving details, that two new action series would also be premiered every month over the coming four months.

The channel, which concentrated on popularising two programming genres in the first year of its operations - action movies and action series, now has five programming franchises including action adventure-reality, action sports and adventure and action animation. Of these action movies, action series and action adventure-reality constituted AXN's principal programming pillars for AXN India, Miller said. Although action animation is not such a big franchise in India it is huge in the Far East, he added.

Queried as to when the channel expected to reach break even status, Miller said he was looking at 2004 or 2005.

On the distribution front, he said the channel currently reached 21.6 million homes, up from 18 million in May with the figure across Asia being 31.5 million.