Disney to hang up phone service aimed at families - Its mobile handsets include a child-tracking feature but have failed to find a big following.

It wasn't the usual happy ending for a Disney project.

Walt Disney Co. said Thursday that it would end its Disney Mobile phone service at the end of the year, the second time in a year that the huge conglomerate has orchestrated a quick closing of a cellphone operation.

The service had been tailored to the communications needs of families and children, offering features designed to enable parents to stay in touch with their children and help youths learn to use cellphones responsibly.

The decision, coming a year after Disney suspended a similar niche offering, Mobile ESPN, illustrates the challenges of competing with national wireless carriers that own their networks. Disney, like many other so-called mobile virtual network operators, leased network capacity from one of the major carriers -- Sprint Nextel Corp., in Disney's case.

"It's a very expensive and formidable challenge, and it's a losing proposition unless you can quickly get to scale," said Mark Donovan, senior analyst with M:Metrics Inc., a Seattle-based mobile research firm.

Launched in June 2006, Disney Mobile 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 -- eliminating potential abuse, such as children sending text messages to friends during class.

The phones also use a global positioning system that enables parents to track a child's whereabouts.

"The stuff they were offering for families was right on target for what people want," Jupiter Research analyst Julie Ask said.

Disney was counting on its brand name to attract customers, most of whom already had cellphones, but its added services were eclipsed by a rapidly changing market.

Major carriers, such as Verizon Wireless and even Sprint, stole its thunder by rolling out similar child-finder services and other family-friendly features.

"Some of the secret sauce of what Disney was trying to provide in a unique offering, some of the bigger carriers have also clued into," said Charles S. Golvin, a wireless analyst for Forrester Research Inc.

Disney Mobile said it also struggled to get broad retail distribution of its phones. That left it relying heavily on the Internet to reach harried parents who didn't invest a lot of time "hanging out on the Internet, looking for the cool new phone," Donovan noted.