At the end of last year, Ofcom published its International Communications Report for 2011. This report offers a huge array of facts and figures on communications usage across 17 countries. It finds that the UK is one of the heaviest users of many new technologies. Some 79% of UK consumers had bought goods online in 2010 - the highest percentage in Europe - while smartphone ownership (which doubled between 2009 and 2010) was also the highest in Europe. Ownership of digital video recorders, meanwhile, was second only to the United States. Such trends were driven, Ofcom implies, by the relative cheapness of such services in the UK, compared with the major European countries and the US.
However, this growth in new media usage is not necessarily coming at the expense of older ones - the amount of time Britons spent watching TV also rose in 2010.
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