The focus lies on the technical realization of the services. In this paper we discuss extensions of Web service frameworks, and present a first implementation of a service-oriented framework for media streaming and digital item adaptation. The main reason is the insufficient support for working with continuous data: generally the suitability of Web services for handling complex data types and state-full applications is still limited. Although service-oriented architectures have become widely accepted in the Web community, the multimedia environment is still dominated by monolithic systems.

For economic reasons this should be done in a service-oriented way, because a lot of adaptation modules can be reused within different adaptation workflows. However, when it comes to content editing, like mixing in subtitles or picture-in-picture composition, relying on third party service providers may be necessary. Such adaptations can be performed in many ways, usually on the media server.

Besides the actual data transport, this also needs a high degree of content adaptation respecting the end users’ needs given by content preferences, transcoding constraints, and device capabilities. Multimedia streaming means delivering continuous data to a plethora of client devices.

Universal media server fast forward