Abstract-The wide range of media and consumer devices, currently available, has raised new security requirements for multimedia systems and their applications. Despite the wide variety of work conducted on the access control, Digital Rights Management (DRM) and adaptation areas to date, there is a lack of initiatives addressing them together. This article analyzes existing initiatives and proposes new technologies for the governed adaptations of secured content in heterogeneous environments. These technologies are integrated in an architecture for the secure management of multimedia contents, which covers the complete digital content value chain, from creation to consumption by end users. Video Surveillance is the application scenario chosen for further illustrating the use of the proposed architecture. Two use cases are discussed in order to address governance, protection and adaptation requirements in surveillance applications.