The more countries you add the longer it would push out the launch date. Youtube Red required content owners to sign the new contracts to allow for ads free +

The more countries you add the longer it would push out the launch date. Youtube Red required content owners to sign the new contracts to allow for ads free + offline play. Trying to get this done at a world-wide scale will be much more time consuming compared to going country-by-country and getting the required rights and contracts to launch this service. So they either have to push out the release date or do what they did. The opinions stated here are my own, not necessarily those of Google.