By Tony Smith
28th August 2008 17:35 GMT

IFA Christmas is going to be a truly festive season for Blu-ray Disc, the organisation behind the optical disc standard forecast today. But it's going to be some time before the format ousts DVD in European consumers' affections.

The Blu-ray Disc Association (BDA) based its rosy prediction on numbers put out by local market watcher Futuresource last week. Futuresource, formerly known as Understanding and Solutions, has long been a torch-bearer for BD. The company reckons some 12m BDs will have been purchased in Europe this year, which sounds a lot but is still only around two per cent of the combined video sales in busy markets like the UK and France.

Look ahead to 2012, and BDs sales will have leapt to 240m a year. That's very good news for the BD supply chain, for sure, but it's not DVD's death knell. Futuresource's numbers indicate that none of the major European economies will have seen BD sales surpass DVD sales by that time.

Four years on - all presumably resounding to the kerching of sales tills at Christmas as consumers, following the BDA's suggestion, splash out on PS3s... er... Blu-ray players - and the best the format will have done is equal DVD sales in France.