Effective and flexible solutions for enabling reduced resource consumption and handling content and associated processing (indexing algorithms) diversity (in terms of location, technical characteristics, execution constraints, requested features) are essential in multimedia management systems. In this paper we present a distributed multimedia retrieval system that enables efficient and effective content processing and access. Though the system’s architecture is a generic one, in order to explain system’s functionalities we will present an instance of the architecture for a video surveillance use case. The proposed system addresses all important topic research concerning this type of systems (architecture, indexing, query) and proposes a novel two steps indexing approach (at acquisition time: implicit indexing and at query time: explicit indexing). We also present in this article how the user access management is done.