This paper describes the Prism distributed multimedia platform. The paper is divided in three parts. The first part resumes the main components of the platjonn. We show the different planes that interact with both multimedia applications and network resources. The second part describes a different approach being developed for the platform to ease the distribution of multimedia objects. It is based on fragmented objects. The third part enumerates two different applications that have been developed for and on that plaform. The first is a specific multimedia protocol and the second is a whiteboard used for tele-teaching.