The MEDIEVAL project aims to leverage today’s Internet with the necessary fabric to provide optimized video services in a mobile wireless world. It is expected that video traffic will surpass Peer-to-Peer (P2P) in volume in the coming years, and thus novel mechanisms and techniques need to be provided to better suit its unique requirements. This article describes the key functional elements of the MEDIEVAL architecture, which provides a video-aware networking core coupled with abstracting interfaces which cater to service and access technology specific requirements, aiming to enable efficient video transport and novel video service development.