CTIA: Disney Mobile to focus on tight-knit family network

LAS VEGAS--The Walt Disney Co. today used CTIA’s Wireless 2006 as the platform to take the wraps off its second MVNO, Disney Mobile, but to the surprise of many in attendance the new operator is not highlighting the reams of high-value Disney content it owns. Rather it’s focusing its service on a comprehensive set of family communications and parental control applications that will link the members of a family share plan more closely than any other service on the market.

The service will allow parents to set controls on how much voice, data and messaging their children use, allowing them to restrict access to any service at different times of day or different days of the week, pre-approve or restrict content to different numbers, and monitor the children’s real-time usage and even their physical locations through GPS. Disney officials said they were basically trying to overcome the reluctance to purchase cellphones for young children and to help parents re-create many of the controls and contact they have with their families at home.

Parents are holding off as long as they can from buying their children cellphones, mainly for safety and security reasons, said Walt Disney Internet Group President Steve Wadsworth at the MVNO’s unveiling. Handing a kid a cellphone, he said, is tantamount to “cutting the cord.”

“We have a pretty close relationship with the family,” Wadsworth said, referring to the nearly one century of children’s movies, theme parks and content Disney has created. “We understand what they want from a mobile service.”

Senior vice president and general manager of Disney Mobile George Grobar detailed a content and application deck that featured services like Family Locator, which tracks family members through GPS; Call Control, a Web base tool that allows parents to set permissions for when and whom family members can call; Family Monitor, which allows parents to allocate specific bundles of minutes, messages and downloads to plan members; and Family Alert!, a communications tool that enables family members to send prioritized messages to each other and the entire group. While Disney Mobile will definitely be offering Disney content over its portal, those applications took a backseat to the family controls, Grobar outlined.

Grobar, however, said Disney, as expected, will distribute exclusive content over the mobile service, following the lead of the company’s “Disney vault” approach, where exclusive material is released periodically by the company. The mobile content service, called Disney Zone will include much of the exclusive content from films, cartoons, games and other Disney online and offline media. Otherwise, Disney went into few other details about the content portal, except to show some themed wallpapers and other snippets of traditional Disney material.

The MVNO will launch in June, using two handsets that LG Electronics and Pantech have designed specifically for the carrier. As previously announced, Sprint’s network will power the service, just as it does Disney’s first MVNO, Mobile ESPN. The handsets will be inexpensive, ranging from $50 to $110, but the two handsets, and all future handsets, will be uploaded with Family Center applications, making them unique in the market and hard for another carrier to emulate.

“This technology has been developed from the ground up for this target segment,” Wadsworth said, responding to questions about competition. “That’s hard to do.