02790: The Stickiness of Disney Life


Six months ago I agreed to a Globe offer for 6 months of free DisneyLife service. This was a limited version of a Disney-owned streaming service that is mainly available in the UK and the Philippines. I figured it would be fun to see how such a service might work with access to Disney, Marvel and Star Wars properties and it did help me finish the final season of Star Wars: Rebels. I've also used it to watch the Duck Tales reboot and the newer Star Wars: Resistance cartoon.

Over a week ago I received a text from Globe that my 6-month trial was coming to an end and it came with instructions on how to end my subscription by texting FREE DISNEYLIFE STOP to 8080. I was pretty sure I didn't want to continue the service with the prospects of the full Disney+ streaming service to come along and the rather limited library that still overlapped significantly with Netflix.

So I sent the code. And I got the system-generated response "Sorry, you have entered an invalid keyword." I tried it a few more times and it still didn't work. So I sent a message to the Facebook page and didn't get a reply and I tried the Twitter account instead.

The Twitter people gave me a different keyword - DLIFE STOP. That didn't work either. Then they gave me the same code as the first text. That still didn't work. So finally the Twitter team referred me to their new Messenger customer service portal - Gie of Globe.

After getting past the chatbot portion of the conversation, the Gie persona gave me the first 8080 text code to process, which still didn't work. This time I sent screenshots of the codes being rejected and the Twitter conversation and eventually the rep said they'd process the cancellation on their end (as the Twitter team had said). After a while they said the request had been submitted and I just needed to check on the status later on.

Today I tried checking on the status as I had received a series of texts that DisneyLife had been removed from my account. I finally got a hold of a rep via the Gie of Globe profile today and they confirmed that DisneyLife had been removed - but now they said I needed to also "unsubscribe on my end". And that doesn't make sense since it implies that a subscription can exist outside of the Globe account when Globe is the exclusive sign-up partner for the streaming service. So now I'm arguing back and forth with the rep who is trying to process things given eventually her the supposed unsubscribe process that I need to do involves that same text code to be send to 8080.

Oh Globe, you're hilarious. And if I get charged for DisneyLife heads will roll.

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