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Current trends in smart homes suggest that several multimedia services will soon converge towards common standards and platforms. However this rapid evolution gives rise to several issues related to the management of a large number of multimedia streams in the home communication infrastructure. An issue of particular relevance is how a context acquisition system can be used to support the management of such a large number of streams with respect to the Quality of Service (QoS), to their adaptation to the available bandwidth or to the capacity of the involved devices, and to their migration and adaptation driven by the users' needs that are implicitly or explicitly notified to the system. Under this scenario this paper describes the experience of the INTERMEDIA project in the exploitation of context information to support QoS, migration, and adaptation of multimedia streams.

Currently, much research aims at coping with the shortcomings in multimedia consumption that may exist in a user's current context, e.g., due to the absence of appropriate devices at many locations, a lack of capabilities of mobile devices, restricted access to content, or nonpersonalized user interfaces. Recently, solutions to specific problems have been emerging, e.g., wireless access to multimedia repositories over standardized interfaces; however, due to usability restrictions the user has to spend much effort to or is even incapable of fulfilling his/her demands. The vision of user-centric multimedia places the user in the center of multimedia services to support his/her multimedia consumption intelligently, dealing with the aforementioned issues while minimizing required work. Essential features of such a vision are comprehensive context awareness, personalized user interfaces, and multimedia content adaptation. These aspects are addressed in this paper as major challenges toward a user-centric multimedia framework.

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