East Asian countries lead the world in embracing digital home products, led by high-tech powerhouses Taiwan and South Korea, a US research firm said Thursday.
Taiwan scored 8.7 points out of a possible 10 when it comes to using digital living products -- home networks, digital entertainment, consumer electronics, broadband and Internet services, Parks Associates said.
South Korea ranked second with a score of 8.4, followed by the United States at 8.1. Canada came next with an 8.0 score, according to results of the firm's 14-nation survey.
Japan placed fifth with 7.9 score followed by Australia at 7.0, Parks Associates said at a conference during CommunicAsia2006, the largest telecommunications trade fair in Asia.
European countries occupied the next six spots and India ranked last with a score of 1.3, below China's 2.9.
"Within Asia, you see a different trend from what's going on in Europe and North America," said John Barrett, director of research at Parks Associates.
"In Asia the consumers are driving the digital home deployment and not the service providers," he said.
"Asian consumers are much more open to using computers as an entertainment platform and that opens up another hub for distribution of content."
Barrett said that despite their low survey scores, both China and India are on a par with their neighbours in using digital home products.
"They ranked low largely because they are very large populous countries that have a substantial number of consumers that still lack basic communications services, Internet access and so on," Barrett said.
