Gangland - Boss Army (Cleveland, OH)

Special edition Gangland, Boss Army of Cleveland, Ohio. Watch one of the hottest, and fastest growing names in the Cleveland entertainment scene as they are featured in this special episode of Gangland. Home to the "Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame," Cleveland is a point of interest to visitors.

Underneath the historic landmarks and busy downtown nightlife, there is a violent, brutal, and vicious way of life within the city itself. With a diverse culture, there are all types of gangs in Cleveland. Some came from other states and started sets here, others were created right in the origin and the heart of Cleveland.

There are tons of gangs and cliques all around the city of Cleveland. With a raising homicide rate nearly up 30% in the last year, its no wonder why the gangs are constantly popping up more often in Cleveland. Sex, drugs, money, and murder are the 4 things that run this city.

Boss Army is a production company that has fine roots in the emotionless streets of Cleveland. Its evident that Boss Army is more then just a production company, but their presence in the streets grown more each day. If there is a major event going on in the underground entertainment scene, 9 times out of 10, Boss Army is tied to that event in some way, shape, or form. 

DealBook: Sony Rejects Loeb Proposal for Splitting Off Entertainment Unit

Norwegian Airline to Move Entertainment System to Wi-Fi

PARIS — Air travel may provide a feeling of freedom, but in-flight entertainment options still tend to be more tethered. That may be about to change.

Norwegian Air Shuttle, one of the biggest airlines in Scandinavia, and Ink, which provides magazines for about 30 carriers worldwide, said Tuesday that they planned to introduce an entertainment system next year that would finally thrust in-flight media more thoroughly into the digital era.

Using the carrier’s free Wi-Fi service, passengers will have access to a range of content, including music, video and travel articles from the carrier’s in-flight magazine, on their smartphones, tablets or laptops. The service will operate from a dedicated online portal, and will be accessible even as planes are cruising at 30,000 feet, or 9,100 meters, or more.

“We wanted to rethink the whole way we organize travel content, from the beginning to the end of a customer journey,” said Stine Steffensen Borke, marketing director at Norwegian.

A number of other airlines have previously upgraded their in-flight media using digital technology — providing, for example, versions of newspapers or magazines, including in-flight publications, for download to passengers’ laptops.

And in-flight entertainment systems long ago moved beyond a handful of channels playing repeating loops of movies and music. But these services generally still operate from an offline server, rather than being connected to the Internet.

Ink and Norwegian say their new service is more ambitious because it is built on the carrier’s Wi-Fi service, which is available on 80 percent of Norwegian’s fleet of 68 planes. Most other carriers that offer Wi-Fi charge passengers for the service, limiting its usefulness as a conduit for in-flight media; Norwegian sees it as a universal service.

Jeffrey O’Rourke, chief executive of Ink, said this opened up new horizons, including the possibility of offering location-based content. For example, articles from the carrier’s magazine and its archives could be served to passengers according to the destinations they are heading for or flying over, he said. Travelers could provide feedback via “social” functions.

Ink also plans to sell advertising for the Norwegian in-flight site.

“In-flight magazines are a great tool for hitting everyone on a plane with the same messages,” Mr. O’Rourke said. “In-flight Wi-Fi is a way to provide a much more diverse and granular offer.”

Norwegian plans to introduce the new portal in January, and to begin additional services throughout the year.

Mr. O’Rourke said Ink was already working on a similar project for another client, the Eurostar train service linking Paris, London, Brussels and other destinations via the Channel Tunnel.

While the Norwegian plan has a digital focus, the old-fashioned in-flight magazine has not been forgotten. That, too, is being remade, and will carry references to the carrier’s online service.

Ms. Steffensen Borke said there were no plans, for now, to phase out the paper publication.

“I’m still surprised by how many people read the magazine,” she said. “At the moment, it’s still a useful channel for us.”

On the Road: In-Flight Entertainment Is at Crossroad

ONE morning last week, I strolled into the spacious, shiny exhibition space of Paramount Pictures at the annual trade show sponsored by the Airline Passenger Experience Association, a network of airlines and businesses and professionals who supply various in-flight comfort and entertainment services, from seats to software.

But a stern-looking woman from Paramount scowled at my name tag, saw that I was a reporter and chased me out. “This is private,” she hissed, as if I might be on the prowl for, say, inside information about Paramount’s deepest movie secrets.

Actually, all I was doing, along with about 2,500 others who attended the convention, was wandering among the scores of exhibitions, admiring a 64-inch digital cabin video monitor here, a cushy lie-flat airline bed with flashy remote controls there, a display of passenger earphones providing concert-hall fidelity over there.

If I had a take-away from the event, it was that in-flight entertainment is at a crossroad. At a time when about a third of passengers are flying with their own devices like tablets and smartphones, how do airlines respond?

Do premium carriers continue to invest heavily in hardware — in expensive in-seat audio and video systems that provide packaged offerings like hundreds of on-demand movies, television programs and video games, but need regular upgrading as technology improves?

Or do other carriers concentrate mostly on improving in-flight Wi-Fi for those passengers who prefer to use their own hardware? If so, do the airlines try to sell them licensed content like movies and video games, while somehow overcoming significant concerns by studios and other providers about piracy? And how do they address passenger discontent about slow, balky in-flight Wi-Fi service, not to mention complaints about the dearth of power outlets on airplanes?

Hollywood studios and other content providers are happy to sell fairly recent movies to airlines to offer on the on-demand seat video systems. But while airlines can save lots of money, including fuel costs, by stripping out the cables and seat screens and installing far-simpler Wi-Fi servers, the studios are wary of streaming content onto personal devices on open networks.

As the industry struggles to sort those things out, I nevertheless sensed a degree of relief at the show’s fancy awards ceremony. Here, at least, was something familiar and tangible — an awards show, the annual Passenger Choice Awards, based on global passenger surveys done with help from the Nielsen Company.

The winners for “best overall passenger experience,” including cabin amenities and in-flight entertainment, were Emirates Airlines and Virgin America. Regional winners were South African Airways (Africa), Virgin America (Americas), SriLankan Airlines (Asia and Australasia), Virgin Atlantic (Europe) and Emirates (Middle East). Norwegian was cited for best in-flight connectivity. But aside from Virgin America and Southwest, which won a nod for best in-flight publication, airlines in the United States were conspicuously missing from the in-flight experience awards.

Meanwhile, Singapore Airlines, for one, continues to bet big on high-end embedded in-flight entertainment.

Singapore, a premium carrier, said it is spending $400 million on an advanced in-flight entertainment and communications system from Panasonic that will be installed on 40 new long-haul planes it has ordered. That’s an improvement on the carrier’s current system, which offers on-demand more than 140 movies and 200 television shows.

On long-haul global flights, the case for embedded entertainment systems is far clearer than on shorter flights, however. That’s where airlines and suppliers are scratching their heads.

For providers of in-flight entertainment of all kinds, the proliferation of smartphones and tablets is clearly confounding. Passengers carrying tablets, smartphones and laptops already have “a very wide range of content available right up to the point where they board the aircraft,” said Robert Smith, the director for market intelligence for IMDC, a consulting firm in Britain.

Traditional and perhaps hidebound in-flight content providers like movie studios aside, “there are some extremely large organizations fighting very hard to be the consumer’s first choice” in providing content, including content that is brought onto the plane by the passenger, he said.

That got me thinking on Sunday, as I was returning home on Southwest Airlines. On that trip, I was deeply engrossed in the in-flight entertainment — a tragic and heartbreaking tale of a spirited young princess who is dragged across a continent to a life of luxury, duty and ultimate horror, as she evolves into a doomed queen caught in the vice of violent history and goes to her savage death with dignity and valor.

Not a dry eye in the house on that drama, I’d say. Incidentally, I brought that particular in-flight entertainment onto the plane with me, in the low-tech form of Antonia Fraser’s brilliant 2001 biography, “Marie Antoinette: The Journey.” The book was far, far better than any movie I might have watched on a screen.