In this paper we present the Mex-Culture Multimedia platform, which is the first prototype of multimedia indexing and retrieval for a large-scale access to digitized Mexican cultural audio-visual content. The platform is designed as an open and extensible architecture of Web services. The different architectural layers and media services are presented, ensuring a rich set of scenarios. The latter comprises summarization of audio-visual content in cross-media description spaces, video queries by actions, key-frame and image queries by example and audio-analysis services. Specific attention is paid to the selection of data to be representative of Mexican cultural content. Scalability issues are addressed as well.Keywords-Web based architecture, media service, scalability, scalable access to large-scale media archives.