Walt Disney Co. announced Thursday that it would terminate its Disney Mobile phone service (MVNO) at the end of this year. The announcement follows a year later after that of the closing of a similar niche offering, Disney's Mobile ESPN. MVNO was the Mouse House's family-friendly proprietary mobile service which gave parents certain features which are usually unavailable with normal mobile phone services.

Launched in June 2006, Disney Mobile MVNO-type phone service enables parents to monitor their children's phone usage or restrict the times of day or the days of the week when the phones would work. This meant, for example, that children could have been prevented from sending text messages to friends during class. The Disney handsets also use a global positioning system that enables parents to track a child's location.

Disney actually had a pretty good offer for families, but what brought its enterprise down was the fact that Disney's competitors, which had significantly more market muscle, rolled out similar family-friendly features which eventually suffocated Disney Mobile. The one mistake that Disney did make was that it relied too much on the internet to market and sell its phones. Meanwhile, major carriers such as Verizon Wireless and Sprint have pushed hard to have a prominent presence in real-life locations such as malls and retail stores. Disney Mobile used leased spectrum space from Sprint.

"Getting the right retail distribution, getting to scale, the rate plans we can offer, the customer support . . . that was going to take substantial investment to get to scale in order to make this great product available," said Steve Wadsworth, president of Walt Disney Internet Group. "That's what drove our conclusion here." He also suggested that the Disney Mobile service might one day reappear as a service offered through the major carriers. "We're in conversations with carriers about that," he said. "So we will pursue those conversations and try to put another model in place."

Disney will allegedly provide its Family Center service, which it will offer through an as yet unnamed operator partner (Sprint?). Family Center service can show parents the location of a child’s handset on a map, limits when and how the child’s phone is used and sets restrictions on voice and data expenditure.