Recently, Ars Technica put out a study discussing how millions of Xbox Live users used their consoles. One surprising claim was that backward compatibility was hardly used. However, it appears that the outlet forgot to take into account various confounding variables and their figures couldn’t be further from the truth.

https://mspoweruser.com/xbox-one-owners-played-500-million-hours-backward-compatible-games/

Some q’s today on back compat use. Roughly 50% of xbox one owners have played, over 508 million hrs of gaming enjoyed. #pastpresentfuture

— Mike Nichols (@m1kenichols) June 7, 2017

BC will always be a good feature for any console to have.

So, almost half of XB1 users have used BC? That's actually pretty high. What was the 1.5% for then? Time used?

Around 17 hours per console or 35 hours per user of that feature and that with many games still not available or only available since weeks or few months.

It's more than I would have guessed.

That was from another study from a third party company using data from 930k users.

If we assume that there is 25m xb1's out there then that means each xb1 used BC for an average of 25 hours. Not much.

not bad

I assume the 1.5% was regular use.

25 hours sounds like a lot to me.

Yeah, considering that the feature is available since end of 2015 and that it's only growing and didn't support many especially bigger games at release, it's a decent number. There are obviously many who don't use it but that also means that there are millions of XBO owners who use it quite often and the library people can choose from and with that the invested time is growing.  

Is that lifetime running total since BC came out?

It still doesn't negate the snapshot of ars technica over a period of 5 months.

https://www.vg247.com/2017/01/05/microsoft-says-xbox-live-engagement-reached-an-all-time-high-of-3-9-billion-hours-in-2016/
During November and December 2016 Xbox Live engagement reached an “all-time high” with 3.9 billion hours spent using the service. Xbox One owners spent 265 million hours playing Xbox 360 games in 2016 via Xbox One Backward Compatibility

Now I guess during the last 2 months of the year the system is played more than the rest of the year, so lets take a very conservative estimate of average 1 billion xbl hours per month, so total for 2016 would be something like 14 billion hours. 265 million out of 14 billion = 1.9% Extrapolate the 1.95 billion hours per month and it's 1.1%

So time spent on XBox BC is between 1.1% and 1.9%

Yet the 'good' thing is, it's growing, not diminishing. Another 235 million hours for the first half of 2017.
Good is relative ofcourse, more time spend on old games, less revenue made. It's all borderline insignificant anyway, 2%, 3%, tiny piece of the pie.