Multimedia must combine graphics, video, and sound in a coherent framework. Speed and quality are fading as major impediments and are replaced by difficulty of use and programming. The goal of this research is to explore new approaches to building multimedia systems based on the object-oriented paradigm. Conceptually, we construct an object-oriented multimedia programming environment, and system, that adheres to an object-oriented systems model, from (arbitrary) applications through multimedia object and stream services modeling and viewing/animation management, to rendering. The approach supports the distributed object model for distributed computing environments.