It is well-recognized that more and more multimedia data has become available to a variety of multimedia applications due to the technological advances in data acquisition, storage, computing, analysis, and communication networks. These multimedia applications have benefited from the knowledge of spatio-temporal phenomena extracted from such tremendous amounts of multimedia data. However, as we are enjoying the new interesting technical possibilities and the available knowledge, we have also noticed the issues and challenges on multimedia content access and distribution for multimedia applications. For example, in multimedia content analysis and retrieval, how to bridge the gap between the semantic meaning and low-level media characteristics and how to handle user perception subjectivity problem have been challenging to researchers in this field. Other issues such as how to provide multimedia network communication support for media streaming and P2P media distribution, and how to ensure secure data acquisition, processing, storage, and communication for multimedia applications should also be addressed. A brief state-of-art analysis is given here.
