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Distributed multimedia systems should deal with critical issues such as temporal requirements of audio and video. Such requirements can become more complex when applications are executed in Interactive Digital Television Systems, since there is a diversity of hardware devices, operating systems and communication technologies. In order to fulfill the requirements of such applications, their constituting components need to interact with each other, as well to consider QoS issues related to devices and transmission media. This paper presents a generic interconnection model that allows communication between components in heterogeneous and distributed multimedia environments. Besides, the model supports adaptation in the middleware layer, triggered by QoS and user requirements changes.

Interactive digital television systems should adopt concepts of adaptation in order to make possible the development of configurable and extensible applications. On the other hand, software component technologies allow software designers to design, develop, maintain and evolve software systems based upon the integration, substitution and adaptation of already available, reusable software artifacts. In previous papers we presented an adaptive middleware with this objective. The present paper extends this middleware to include a meta-component model to describe and to represent applications independently of technology aspects. The paper also describes the implementation of the model that has been used to build an example application.