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Partially out of pure curiosity, partially to find which components are popular for the HTPC I am building, and partly to help build out the MediaPortal documentation wiki, I wanted to find out what the "average" MediaPortal user is using for their HTPC system.

Many MP users have parts of their HTPC system listed in their forum profile, so I decided to use that information. Since MP is an open source project under very active development, I guess most MP users will also be forum users, so there will be not too much difference between the average MP user and the average MP forum user. (But this is just one of very many assumptions that has to be made analysing the data  )

Over the course of several weeks, I checked the profiles of people who had recently visited the forum. I did this instead of reading random profiles, to get most up-to-date profiles, and the highest amount of active users. I did this at various hours of the day and night, and on various days during the week, to get a diverse collection of users. (Not only those in my timezone and that are online at the same moments I normally am.) Now, let's start showing some numbers...

General user information

All together, I read over 700 profiles. This was about the maximum I can handle in my spare time, so I hope it is enough to give some reliable averages.

The average age of the users is 32, with a high 20% of all users being between 30 and 33. My guess why this number is a bit higher than what you normally see for the average computer-user, is because building an HTPC requires some financial investment and/or because building a dedicated HTPC makes more sense when you have a proper livingroom (as opposted to just a student room).

The countries with the highest number of MP users are:

• Germany (21% of all analysed users)
• Sweden (10%)
• Australia (9%)
• North America (8%)
• England (8%)

Now, these numbers are not really fair if you want to see in which countries MP is most popular, because these countries have totally different sizes. If you relate the number of users to the number of inhabitants in a country, you get a different top-5. Since I have no information on the total number of MP users, I can only give indexed numbers, related to the top country, Sweden. Now the top 5 is:

• Sweden (index value = 1)
• Norway (0.88)
• Danmark (0.65)
• New Zealand (0.62)
• Australia (0.41)

These numbers mean that if in Sweden 1 in every 100.000 inhabitants would be using MP, then in Norway it is 0.88 in every 100.000, in Denmark 0.65 in every 100.000, etc. If anybody would have the absolute number of MP users, I could even tell you what percentage of the inhabitants of each country is using MP.

Open source software like MediaPortal is very popular in Scandinavia, so the first three places don't surprise me. But I am surprised about New Zealand and Australia in the top-5.

Edit:

All of a sudden I realize we do have some absolute numbers! We can see how many different users have visited the forums in the last year. Now of course there may be a few users with multiple accounts (because they lost their password) and some forum users may not be MP users (just temporarily interested). But overall, I think this will give interesting numbers.

And did I give an example of 1 in every 100.000 inhabitants? Boy, was I wrong!!! Let's start with Sweden. 10% of the people I analyzed were from Sweden, and Sweden has 9.2 million inhabitants. Now, checking the forums, I see we've had (please sit down or hold on to something...) almost 19.000 different users in the last year! (You can check this amount for yourself.) Ok, so 10% of 19.000 means 1.900 users from Sweden in the last year. And on an population of 9.2 million, this means slightly over 1 in 5.000 Swedes has visited the MP forums! And with an average household size of 2.1, this means there's one MP HTPC in at least every 2400 families, which counts up to over 330 in Sweden's capital Stockholm. (The actual numbers will even be higher, since not every MP HTPC users may be a forum user.) Wow......

Ok, here is the top 5 again, with numbers:

• Sweden: 1 in 4959
• Norway: 1 in 5610
• Denmark: 1 in 7659
• New Zealand: 1 in 7798
• Australia: 1 in 12101

Of the analysed users, 25% had not posted any messages yet. The rest can be divided into 4 equal-sized groups:

• those that posted up to 0.1 post per day,
• up to 0.4 posts per day,
• up to 1.2 posts per day,
• and over 1.2 posts per day.

The users who posted messages, can also be divided into 5 equal groups based on how long they have been member:

• 0-2 months,
• 3-6 months,
• 7-10 months,
• 11-18 months and
• 19 months or longer.

Ok, enough personal information, the next post will be about the actual HTPC systems! Check out below at #5.