Disney Mobile to Shut Down at the End of the Year

The Walt Disney Company announced recently that it would be suspending service on it's fledgling MVNO, Disney Mobile, effective December 31st, 2007. The brand, which was created in 2006 and was targeted towards parents of young children (safe phone that could be monitored and had GPS to track their children), just could not get up to speed fast enough in order to keep pace.

The company's lackluster sales and poor distribution are cited as the main reasons for the closure. They acknowledge that without an extensive brand building campaign they would not achieve the level of success needed to produce competitive numbers. They also claim that spending the money, while possible, would probably not be worth while in such a competitive marketplace.

The brand name and child friendly content was just not enough to compete with companies like Verizon and Sprint who were also heavily pushing kid friendly phones and were willing to spend the money to get the word out!

Truth be told it really does not look like their is much room for many MVNOs in the marketplace and the future does not look better, unless of course your company name is Virgin Mobile!

Disney Mobile runs over the Sprint network.