Microsoft today announced the rollout of its raft of Zune services beyond American borders. Rumors of an expanded Zune Marketplace have been kicking around for a few weeks, and this announcement confirms many of the previous predictions.

Zune Marketplace's four services—the Zune Pass music subscription, music sales, video sales, and movie rentals—are all being brought to new markets. The services available will vary from country to country; the UK and France will get all four, but other territories—including Canada, Mexico, New Zealand, and Australia—will get only a subset, with the full list available in the press release.

The services are all part of Microsoft's "three screens" strategy; content bought on the Marketplace will be accessible on your tiny phone screen with Windows Phone 7, your modest PC screen through Windows, and your 65-inch monster TV courtesy of Xbox. Microsoft wants media purchased or rented from Zune Marketplace to be accessible wherever you are, using whichever technology makes most sense.

Pricing for the Zune Pass was also announced; €9.99/month for Eurozone countries, £8.99/month for the UK, inclusive of all relevant taxes. This confirms the pricing that leaked earlier in the month. The range of purchase and rental prices is yet to be confirmed.

The Zune Pass subscription service offered to these new countries will be slightly different to the version currently in operation in the US. The American subscription is a combination deal of all-you-can-eat access to the Zune catalog that expires at the end of your subscription, and ten downloads per month that are yours to keep. The new non-US markets will get the first part—access to the Zune catalog—but not the second. Keeping ten songs a month will be a strictly American perk.

The difference may be due to the European pricing being a little cheaper than the US—at current exchange rates, about $13/month for the Eurozone, $14/month for the UK, compared to the $14.99 currently charged in the US—and that difference grows even greater when one considers that the European prices all include VAT (at around 20 percent), unlike the US price which is exclusive of tax.

The announcement is not a huge surprise. There are three parts to the Zune system: the device software, the PC software, and the online service. Two of these, the device software and PC software, have already been confirmed as key parts of the Windows Phone 7 offering. On the phones themselves, music and video playback will use an interface almost identical to that of the current Zune HD. On the PC, the Zune software will be used for delivering some firmware updates and device syncing.

It was, therefore, logical to expect that the third part of the Zune ecosystem would be expanded as well. The previous lack of an international Marketplace was always hard to fathom; it's the likely reason that the Zune HD was never offered for sale outside the US. This was a decision that all but ensured that the media player, already facing an uphill fight against the iPod family, would always be a niche product.

Even with the new wider Marketplace availability, Microsoft has said nothing about the other Zune rumors floating around: the Zune HD may yet see a follow-up, but Redmond is keeping tight-lipped about it if it is.