Besides the PC, an increasing number of multimedia devices -- such as set-top boxes, PDAs, and mobile phones -- already provide networking capabilities. However, today's multimedia infrastructures adopt a centralized approach, where all multimedia processing takes place within a single system. The network is, at best, used for streaming predefined content from a server to clients. Conceptually, such approaches consist of two isolated applications, a server and a client. The realization of complex scenarios is therefore complicated and error-prone -- especially since the client has typically no or only limited control of the server.

The Network-Integrated Multimedia Middleware (NMM) overcomes these limitations by enabling access to all resources within the network: distributed multimedia devices and software components can be transparently controlled and integrated into an application. In contrast to all other multimedia architectures available, NMM is a middleware, i.e. a distributed software layer running in between distributed systems and applications. As an example, this allows for the quick and easy development of an application that receives TV from a remote device -- including the transparent control of the distributed TV receiver. Even a PDA with only limited computational power can run such an application: the media conversions needed to adapt the audio and video content to the resources provided by the PDA can be distributed within the network. While the distribution is transparent for developers, no overhead is added to all locally operating parts of the application. To this end, NMM also provides a standard multimedia framework for all kinds of desktop applications.