Applications are the driving forces to support the development of new networking technologies. High-speed networks are becoming available. New functionalities such as multicasting, synchronization or group management are required to enable distributed multimedia applications and services. Advances in various areas such as network technology, video coding, end-station architectures, and operating systems will provide the building blocks for realizing these applications. In this paper, we briefly describe some of the current activities that contribute to the high-performance networking and multimedia application framework, with emphasis on communication architectures and video.