GLOBAL: In its latest move to elevate the onboard entertainment experience, Carnival Cruise Line has adopted AV Stumpfl’s PIXERA  media server platform to power immersive visual content across its entertainment spaces. Four of Carnival’s 29 ships are already sailing with PIXERA technology — including the Carnival Encounter and Carnival Adventure, which both embarked on maiden voyages from Brisbane and Sydney earlier this year — with more ships scheduled to join the fleet-wide upgrade programme in the coming months.

“We discovered PIXERA is the ideal solution to meet our needs,” says Grant Kruger, Entertainment Technical Fleet Supervisor – Lighting at Carnival Cruise Line. “It delivers high-performance video playback, ensuring a consistent and polished show experience that can be reliably repeated for many years.”

PIXERA drives LED visuals across Carnival’s main theatres, lounges, and smaller performance venues, ensuring seamless synchronisation across multiple screens and formats. One of the platform’s biggest advantages, Kruger explains, lies in its hardware-agnostic flexibility. “PIXERA provides us with the freedom to utilise our own custom-built servers, which is essential to our workflow. We manage the full technical operations in-house across 29 ships – everything from fixture maintenance to media servers.”

Beyond performance, PIXERA’s integration capabilities have proven equally valuable. Supporting PSN (PosiStageNet) and Notch protocols, the platform interfaces effortlessly with Carnival’s real-time automation and tracking systems — a critical requirement for precision-driven live shows.

Ease of deployment was another deciding factor. “We had the system up and running – show playback ready – within three days on both vessels [the Encounter and Adventure],” Kruger recalls; with the Carnival team able to copy and adapt project folders from one ship to the next with minimal reprogramming, thanks to PIXERA’s flexible show management and timeline tools. “We were able to build everything on one ship and just walk over to the other one and deploy it instantly. That was really great.”

David Horner of VC Live Ltd, lighting director/programmer on the upgrade project, additionally highlights PIXERA’s intuitive user interface, free offline software for pre-programming and show review, compatibility with multiple encoded formats, and ability to create custom user interfaces – as well its ease of integration with lighting consoles and ability to create custom lighting desk personalities – as major advantages over less feature-rich media servers.

Even within the uniquely demanding cruise environment — marked by networking challenges, tight schedules, and strict redundancy needs — PIXERA demonstrated stability and reliability. “We did have one or two hiccups on one of our ships. But by just submitting a support ticket and the PIXERA team sending over the support package, we were able to get the solution really quickly. The stability has been exceptional – we’ve had no issues with performance inconsistencies or bugs” Kruger affirms.

As Carnival prepares to host over half a million guests from Australian ports alone in 2025, its partnership with AV Stumpfl signals a clear intent: to redefine the cruise entertainment experience with world-class visual technology. “PIXERA gives us the control, flexibility, and support we need to keep pushing the boundaries of what’s possible with LED content at sea,” Kruger concludes.