One minor note from a Disney nerd: Disney World no longer gives you the wristband (magicband) by default. You can buy one, but they want you to either use your phone or a RFID card they give you when you buy the ticket.
The rumor is that they were never able to make effective use of the long range data collection beacons that used the bands. Alternatively (and more likely IMO), they realized that knowing how many people were in an area was a matter of measuring how many unique devices scanned for the Wi-Fi AP in that area, which would work even if you didn’t have a band or the battery in the band died (the battery was necessary for the long range functionality, you could still get in the park via RFID no matter what).
Since they never launched the bands at Disneyland, they probably were able to do a a/b test and confirm that they didn’t get additional useful data from the bands (or that their data science team wasn’t able to use the data to improve guest experience, anyway).
> The rumor is that they were never able to make effective use of the long range data collection beacons that used the bands. Alternatively (and more likely IMO), they realized that knowing how many people were in an area was a matter of measuring how many unique devices scanned for the Wi-Fi AP in that area, which would work even if you didn’t have a band or the battery in the band died (the battery was necessary for the long range functionality, you could still get in the park via RFID no matter what).
IIRC both are true. MB was in development before phones were everywhere, so it's a long time pivot basically.
Also the 2 reasons I've seen that the data was thrown out was not due to use, rather the data was VERY bad / corrupted and not as accurate as they needed.
Correct, I forgot that. They never launched them as a free accessory for guests to help with payments/room key/FastPass/admission/data collection though, like MyMagic+ at Disney World. They are mostly a wearable ticket now (and I presume they can be used as room keys/payments at Disneyland too, but it’s been a minute since I’ve been there).
The rumor is that they were never able to make effective use of the long range data collection beacons that used the bands. Alternatively (and more likely IMO), they realized that knowing how many people were in an area was a matter of measuring how many unique devices scanned for the Wi-Fi AP in that area, which would work even if you didn’t have a band or the battery in the band died (the battery was necessary for the long range functionality, you could still get in the park via RFID no matter what).
Since they never launched the bands at Disneyland, they probably were able to do a a/b test and confirm that they didn’t get additional useful data from the bands (or that their data science team wasn’t able to use the data to improve guest experience, anyway).