The development of distributed multimedia applications is supported by an increasing number of services. While such services pave the way towards sophisticated multimedia support even in distributed systems, using them still makes the task of developers quite tedious. This is because several inconsistent services have to be interfaced in order to reflect different aspects. As a way to alleviate this problem, we make the case for an encompassing framework in which all services would be offered

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... der a unifying paradigm. First we give an overview of existing multimedia services with a focus on distribution, extracting the requirements imposed on multimedia extensions to general frameworks as a set of so-called abstractions. Known development environments for distributed applications are obvious candidates for such encompassing frameworks. We review these based on four popular paradigms: client-server / remote procedure call, object-orientation, hypermedia, and open documents; we also investigate possible multimedia extensions, and discuss the 'expressive power' of the paradigms. In conclusion we propose steps towards an encompassing framework based on a hybrid object/hypermedia paradigm.