Everything in the UK is still cathching on, hate how behind we are with everything. Still no iTunes Radio either.
iTunes radio is defiantly licence issues. Apple pay is weird tho isn't it, UK (Europe) has had contact less payments/cards much longer than USA. Must be dealing with the banks.
I think Apple is not even pushing ApplePay in Europe yet, you can clearly see that their main focus is the US and China at present. Perhaps it’s because iPhones are much less popular over here, so the incentives for banks and shop proprietors are not as big as they are overseas. iTunes Radio is probably also due to a lack of initiative on Apple’s part. They were able to bring iTunes Match and iTunes in the Cloud to many countries in a very short time-frame. It should be trivial for them to bring iTunes Radio.
iTunes in the cloud is hardly supported anywhere, fully at least. Germany for example only got videos and tv shows in the cloud a couple of months ago. There is only like 5 countries that fully support iTunes in the cloud which is most likely due to licensing issues. UK for example had the full iTunes in the cloud experience since it was launched. I also don't think iTunes Radio is a trivial thing to do, they need to hammer out all the license fees etc, which takes time. Apple pay should me coming soon to uk tho, defiantly this year. Can't wait.
It can't launch in the uk yet as Visa Europe doesn't support tokenization yet which is required for it to work, once visa supports it after April then apple can work with the banks to get it supported http://uk.mobile.reuters.com/article/idUKKBN0LS0LP20150224?irpc=932
Given that Visa Europe are aiming for April 2015 to implement Tokenisation I'm guessing it'll be ready for when the first batches of Apple Watch are delivered. iTunes Radio UK? I don't think we'll get to experience it. More than likely we'll have to wait for Beats Music to launch internationally before we get it. Look at like this... Siri has been around since iPhone 4S and we can't still buy movie tickets or book a table through Siri....
Well to be fair Apple have deliberately made it easy for us to experience it by leaving it wide open if we were to change our iTunes account to a USA based one ,or if using Apple TV simply change your region to USA. You can then play iTunes radio just fine I've done it myself.
The running theory is H2 but certainly before the end of the year. Apple definitely cares about this because Apple Pay is a big money maker for them.