Globe Telecom yesterday announced a multi-year partnership with The Walt Disney Company, which owns Pixar, Marvel, Star Wars, and multi-channel network Maker Studios, among many others, in an effort to bring more family-friendly content and experiences to a swelling user base of 44 million. Now, if you’re on Smart — and there’s a good chance you are given the carrier’s 56-million-strong subscribers — you may be thinking, “Haven’t I heard of this a few months ago?”
Um, not really. Because what Globe is serving is the full-course meal of the Disney experience that’s objectively superior to its rival’s appetizer plate of Disney-branded content. When the Smart-Disney collaboration was disclosed in January this year, consumers were given access to a plethora of Disney mobile games and ebooks that can be purchased using prepaid credit or by way of carrier billing. That’s it.
Globe, meanwhile, is offering video-on demand services — beloved Pixar franchises like Toy Story and Finding Nemo, Disney TV favorites, including Mickey Mouse Clubhouse and Phineas & Ferb, and Disney Channel programming — in addition to the stuff Smart has listed. Everything can be accessed by prepaid, postpaid, and broadband customers on their smartphone or tablet, even when they’re away from home.
The story here is about Globe making Disney’s most enduring and memorable creations available to anyone who owns a phone or tablet.
As for the actual offers, Globe has yet to finalize the Disney bundles it will be adding and whether or not a Toy Story marathon will count towards your monthly data allowance (we’re crossing our fingers it won’t). Regardless, it should be clear which carrier is bringing the true Disney experience to its ecosystem.
Globe’s latest effort sounds rushed, if not incomplete, sure, but the last time I checked, Disney didn’t become the entertainment behemoth it is today by telling stories through games and ebooks.
MY TAKE: Globe following in its rival’s footsteps and aligning with the Disney empire isn’t the story here. The story is instead about Globe making Disney’s most enduring and memorable creations available to anyone in the Philippines who owns a phone or tablet. And that, I believe, should be the function of any collaboration involving the company responsible for The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, The Lion King, and Frozen, to name a few.
The way I see it, one company has a Porsche-designed BlackBerry, the other owns the car itself. And we all know which one is more desirable.
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