An MVNO, One Segment at a Time

By Kevin Fitchard
July 6, 2005

Disney apparently has more plans for its vast stores of entertainment content than just a wireless service for baseball fans and NASCAR dads. Today Disney announced its second mobile virtual network operator, Disney Mobile, a service that capitalizes on the family movies, cartoons and merchandise that gave Disney its name.

While a lot of MVNOs have launched over the last few years, Disney appears to be taking the concept to heart. While other youth-oriented MVNOs have been targeting segments in broad swathes, Disney seems intent on narrowing its focus within those segments. It helps that Disney owns some of the biggest brands in the world--an MVNO featuring the Lion King and Mickey Mouse has a much broader appeal than just the pre-teen market the company is obviously targeting. But by creating a specific service for each sub-segment or each sub-brand, Disney's doing a very smart thing. It can pack a lot of paid content and entertainment and services into its data plans without worrying about alienating a more general target audience with cutesiness. Nor is it likely to overload its target audience of Mouse-philes with too much--at the rate at which parents are buying limited edition DVDs from the "Disney Vault," I'd be surprised if they could stop their kids from spending on this new mobile service.

Basically we're witnessing the culmination of the idea of the MVNO. As content providers embrace the model, we're going to see a lot more specific tailoring of services to very narrow user segments. From Disney's perspective, they all run on the same network (Sprint's). The brands are already built (Disney, ESPN, CNN, Pixar). It's just a matter of identifying the right portfolio of entertainment and building a service around it.