After more than a year of existence only on the U.S. market, the Xbox Live Video Marketplace officially expanded today into Canada, UK, Ireland, France, and Germany.

Unfortunately, gamers in Canada and Europe will have to set lower expectations for their local versions of the Xbox Live Video Marketplace.  While the U.S. has access to hundreds of TV series and movies, the Marketplace available in the new territories will be made up of little more than 30 films.

Reasons behind the slimmer selection outside of the U.S. are due to language requirements and licensing issues. As each country has its own language and content laws, Microsoft must secure individual rights for the content available on the Xbox Live Video Marketplace.

“Any time we bring something new to Xbox Live Marketplace we want to make sure that it’s an amazing consumer experience,” said Scott Nocas, Global Marketing Manager for Xbox Live. “We make sure we have a ton of content and we make sure we have local content. We also want to bring it to multiple countries and, right now, we really wanted to focus on the movies because we felt that was really one of the better offerings that Xbox in the U.S. had.”

Speaking specifically on the Canadian market, Nocas added, “We’ll be updating movies on a monthly basis. As new releases come in from our partners, we’ll put them up on the same day that everyone else has it, and we’ll be adding to the Library titles. At launch, the U.S. Video Store had 37 titles, but we now have over 300 movies. So, for Canada, we plan to aggressively add movies as fast as we can.”

Movies such as 300, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Ocean’s 13, The Reaping, Delta Farce, Air Guitar Nation and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre are now available on the Canadian Xbox Live Video Marketplace.