Apple’s announced that it will reveal iCloud at WWDC, and the rumour mill is swirling with what features the service will bring. Foremost among them is the claim Apple has signed up the four major record labels for a cloud music service. Other claims are that Apple will offer similar back-up/streaming services for movies, television shows and documents.

I’d be excited about this, if it wasn’t for two things. First, I don’t buy a lot of iTunes content, and I’ve a horrible feeling Steve Jobs is going to bang on about some ‘magical’ system that backs up your iTunes purchases to the cloud. I can’t imagine there’s any chance we’ll see all your music, regardless of source, available. In part, this is because Apple itself won’t have copies of all tracks anyway, but also labels are greedy and will almost certainly block any attempt to enable access to tracks that might have been downloaded on the sly, even if they would make money from streaming subscriptions. Another possibility would be for Apple to offer a small ‘upgrade’ fee per track, like it did for iTunes Plus, but that also seems a stretch. In any case, Spotify will probably remain a better bet for Brits.

The second concern I have stems from my experience with the Apple TV. Using my UK iTunes account, it’s still the same content-light box it was when I got the device at Christmas, and that’s never changed for Brits since the dawn of the revamped black box. By contrast, Americans get Netflix, TV rentals, baseball and more. It’s understandable that Apple concentrates first on the US, which is a large, affluent market, but it’s disappointing there are no Apple TV deals in the UK to integrate iPlayer, 4OD and LoveFilm at the very least—and UK TV rentals might never happen. With iCloud, you can bet Jobs will reveal a bunch of great features, only for anyone outside of the USA to chance across a subtly different web page on their country’s Apple site, missing features but, crucially, not missing any of an associated price-tag. (You can also bet that the US tech media will fail to report on this, too, as always.)

The one saving grace here will be if Apple finally manages to provide some kind of usable, useful back-up and restoration process for iOS devices. If my iPod, iPhone and iPad could save app data and preferences to the cloud and reinstate them on an app reinstall, and perhaps even optionally sync data (such as progress in videogames), I’ll be prepared to overlook Apple overlooking my country.