Much research is currently being conducted towards Universal Multimedia Access, aiming at removing barriers that arise when
multimedia content is to be consumed with more and more heterogeneous devices and over diverse networks. We argue that users
should be put at the center of the research work to enable user-centric multimedia access.
In this paper we present the requirements for a user-centric multimedia access system in a networked home environment. These
requirements are easy access to available content repositories, context awareness, content adaptation and session migration.
After showing the limits of state-of-the-art technologies, we present the architecture of a system which allows unified access
to the home network content, automatically delivered to rendering devices close to the user, adapted according to the rendering
device constraints, and which is also capable of session mobility.
Keywords Universal Multimedia Access - Multimedia adaptation - UPnP AV - Context awareness - Content sharing